


and the world forgot about gene loves jezebel

by kylonaberrie



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Autistic Kylo Ren, Coming Out, Dad Vader, Darth Vader Adopts the Knights of Ren, Everybody's Autistic, Everybody's Trans, Female Kylo Ren, Found Family, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Inspired by Fanart, Name Changes, Original Knights of Ren - Freeform, Skywalker Family Drama, Teenagers with Trauma, Trans Kylo Ren, identity exploration, 中文翻译 | Translation in Chinese
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-08
Updated: 2020-06-26
Packaged: 2021-02-27 04:14:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 18
Words: 31,118
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22170880
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kylonaberrie/pseuds/kylonaberrie
Summary: In the aftermath of Luke's betrayal, Ben looks for safety in the only place she can think of: with the other person Luke couldn't kill.
Relationships: Knights of Ren & Kylo Ren, Knights of Ren & Kylo Ren & Darth Vader, Kylo Ren & Darth Vader
Comments: 33
Kudos: 93





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> this is based off of [this fanart](https://oldbolo.tumblr.com/post/171642280836/au-where-darth-vader-is-alive-and-ben-goes-to-him) by oldbolo on tumblr bc my heart and also it was midnight and i felt like writing and i love found family & the knights of ren. no fuckin clue where its going just gonna keep writing til i dont
> 
> also trans f kylo bc what the fuck else am i on this earth to write about
> 
> kylos a baby teen rather than 23 in this also because fuck canon ~~eighteen chapters in and i remembered the word "preteen" exists rip~~
> 
> probably no romance in this but if there is it will be teens smooching other teens. a newly wrangled list of content warnings, now that i know more about what this is about, and to be updated:  
> \- usual sw past violence, abuse, manipulation, etc. all the kylo & vader shit  
> \- child abuse, some of which is/is implied to be pretty intense and/or sexual (past, talked about)  
> \- vomiting  
> \- a whole lotta trauma. a whole lot  
> \- other mental illness themes. lots of panic attacks  
> \- transphobia (past experiences with, talked about)  
> \- self harm  
> \- suicidal ideation & suicide threats
> 
> now available in chinese [here,](https://baiwang955.lofter.com/post/1ffdd226_1c765e7c8) thanks to [machalicai!](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MachaliCai/pseuds/MachaliCai)
> 
> previously titled "and call them brothers" after [call them brothers by regina spektor & jack dishel](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ho1ShVDMtx4). but i changed it because it was like two in the morning when i did that and i had a better idea
> 
> new title from [abandoned flesh by the mountain goats](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjbgLffCBXo)

_ but the world came to agree _

_ what you see is what you get _

_ and what you get is what you see _

[ \-- the mountain goats, “abandoned flesh” ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjbgLffCBXo)

The ship is a small transport, meant to shuttle them all to and from the temple; the vast wilderness and the shelter of trees. It was the only ship for miles, and the survivors are going to be stranded, likely with only ash and rubble, for-- days, or weeks, depending on when the next supply ship comes along; depending on how well the varied comlinks and computers survived the burning.

Ben isn’t thinking about that. She’s thinking about very little, hands tense and sweaty on the control sticks, seated in the pilot’s seat with her friends -- are they friends, now? -- behind her, save Pedima in the copilot’s chair. Ben’s already snapped at her for talking, she just can’t stand talking right now, can’t deal with it, and so it ended when she finally broke. They sit in silence, the seven of them. Ben isn’t watching anything or anybody except what’s outside the front viewport, thick red clouds engulfing them as they enter atmo. She’s shivering as she clenches the controls tighter and tighter, but she’s not paying attention to that, either. She just needs-- to get there. She just needs, to get them safe.

The surface of Mustafar makes itself real to them as they descend. The air is thick outside the ship and has a reddish quality, like looking through a camera filter. She knows this is the right place, at least. She knows this is her only gamble. ‘Pedima--’ she says, speaking for the first time in hours, and sees in her peripheral vision that she in question jumps. Her voice is cracked and waverly, lips dry with thirst, and she can feel the attentions of the others turned to her as well. She licks her lips. ‘Prepare descent.’

Pedima reaches for the copilot’s controls, paws shaking but steady. Ben used to be jealous of her, how unapologetic she is, over and over again with her screwups, how easily she bounces back. She doesn’t know what she feels, now. They bring the ship down to a careful landing between the black trees, the only grove of them for miles. This place hums with the dark side of the force, scary, electrifying. It’s good, even as she hears intakes of breath behind her. It means they’re on the right track.

She gets up, suddenly. ‘We’re here.’ The others, shell-shocked or dead-eyed, react at different speeds, but she’s already snatching up her cloak and draping it around her shoulders and waiting for the ramp to descend.

Outside the air is thick and hot and smoke hangs around constantly, a strange smell about it. She walks down the ramp and into the ash-grey dirt, soft and redistributing under her feet, before she can think about it. The trick, she’s discovered, is not to let herself think about it. She knows they’re in the right place.

And there are others, here. She hadn’t expected that. They’re fanned out around the area, attracted no doubt by the sound of the ship landing, inspecting its underbelly, approaching her warily from meters away. Her hand is on her lightsaber instantly, and she draws it, nerves tight, thoughts vanished. She can hear the others faltering on the ramp behind her. The persons around them pause. They’re humanoid, wrapped in grey bandages and clothing so much as to completely obscure their bodies and features. But they’re not special, in the force, they don’t glitter. What are they doing, Ben thinks, in a place like this.

‘Je-di,’ one rattles, voice forming odd around a foreign word. Some of them have blasters, trained warily on her.

‘I am no Jedi,’ Ben says, and it hurts to say. She takes a steadying breath. ‘I want -- we want -- to see Lord Vader. To speak with him.’

‘Vader. Not here.’

A note of panic strikes her, but she swallows it. They can do this. She can do this. ‘Where is he then.’

‘Below.’

‘Take us to him.’

Something odd happens as she says it. The person she’s talking to, the one in front with a sawed-off blaster several decades old, lets its aim drop, holding it loosely at their side. Their other arm drops too, swings with gravity, vacantly, their shoulders drooping. Ben stares. ‘Take you to him,’ they repeat, and turn on the spot. Her breath catches as she lowers her lightsaber and extinguishes it though keeping it in hand. Did she just Je-- that was a mind trick. That was the first time she ever used a mind trick.

Breathe in, breathe out. Don’t think about it. Just follow.

She takes steps in the soft dirt, hearing the others hurry after her, hearing the ramp close. She doesn’t look back. Her vision is unfocused, head pounding. She doesn’t try to refocus it, or make sense of this. Don’t think about it. Just follow.

The other persons in the clearing let the seven of them pass, following the one. The trees go on for a short while until they don’t, the landscape suddenly a barren wasteland of dark volcanic rock, air still thick and smoky. Between rocks glimpses of lava shine hot and bright. This was the Mustafar she was expecting. But she isn’t thinking about that. She isn’t-- thinking. The others are talking quietly behind her. She doesn’t listen.

The person leads them step by step away from their clearing and ship. They walk for a while. It’s evening in this place on this planet, and the sun slowly creeps down behind the black rock formations on the horizon. She’s tired, and hungry. She ignores this. The others are talking behind her. She ignores them.

They come to the side of a dry caldera, and their guide starts hopping down the rocks, taking them down into the pit it forms. She follows and swears when her foot slips one and her ankle burns in pain. Every step after that hurts more and more, but she can deal with pain. She can deal with pain. She keeps her eyes on the back of their guide’s head. The others are quiet behind her, save an occasional sniffle and catching of breath. She ignores this.

Their guide takes them into a cave where thick rivers of lava can be seen in the distance. The air is stiflingly hot, and the discomfort of heat distracts Ben from the pain in her ankle, which feels as though it’s stabbing her with every footstep. She’s crying, though it takes her a bit to notice. Her eyes sting with the tears and the ash. She just has to keep moving.

The path through the cave is long and winding, but finally they come to a staircase. Others behind her are crying too, she can hear them. She isn’t ignoring it, but she doesn’t know what she can do other than move forwards. It’s not too late to go back, the way was simple, but this is their chance. She’s not giving it up. She takes step by painful step down the stairs. Please let it stop soon, she thinks. Please, let us be there soon. It’s a plea, over and over in her mind, until she remembers to stop thinking, and then there is only the pain, the discomfort, the protest of every moment in a whirlwind inside her.

Deep in the cave they reach a door, and their guide stops a foot from it. Behind it, loud hissing. ‘Vader,’ they croak, ‘in there.’

Ben coughs, and coughs, before she can speak. ‘Tell-- no-one we came.’

They don’t speak, only turn and leave.

She faces the door: black, and carved with a glyph, something she can’t place and doesn’t care to. Instead she opens it, heart pounding, hoping for everything that isn’t more of this.

Inside is a carved black hall: tall ceiling, open upper walkway, and to the left a waterfall spills from a hole in the rock down to land somewhere unseen, the cascade of water and hiss of steam somewhere down below drowning out their footsteps and breathing and tears. It’s just as hot in here, but sweaty, not ashy. She stumbles on her bad ankle, and cries out as she feels something snap, falling to one knee. She can’t hear that, either.

Get up, she tells herself. You can take this. This is nothing. Get up and keep moving.

Someone is beside her: Gabriela, holding out her hand. Ben takes it, and struggles to her feet, shaking, drenched in sweat, almost pulling Gabriela down with her. Just a few more steps, she tells herself. Just a few more steps, and then a few more--

She takes one, shaking, and feels bile rise in her throat with the pain, but she hasn’t eaten in hours and nothing comes up she can’t swallow. She takes another step, and cries out, losing it to the noise of the waterfall. Gabriela is at her side again, reaching under her arm, giving her support. She puts her own arm like a steel beam around Gabriela’s shoulders, and holds on, and together they stumble to the stairs and slowly up them, the others following in a close group. She doesn’t know which way they’re going but she doesn’t and can’t think about it. She just follows her instincts, follows the darkness step after painful step.

From the hallway they arrive into a grand cavern, ceiling several stories high. Her arm is sticking with sweat to Gabriela’s tunic and the fur of her shoulders. Here, the waterfall is muffled again, and they can hear, though all Ben hears is her pounding heart and her thoughts, over and over again, keep going, keep going, keep going. She speaks and does not recognise her own voice, or where the words came from: ‘Through... there.’ She raises her free hand to weakly point at a door at the top of the hall, up a long, sweeping stair, similarly not knowing where the direction came from, or the movement. Not her, certainly. All she is is writhing inside herself in pain.

They climb. It’s tedious. Every step hurts more and more; something in her ankle is wrong and she can feel where it snapped, where the bones are now malaligned. Someone is crying, besides her. Somehow, they reach the top. Ben doesn’t have to tell herself not to think anymore. She reaches for the door, and it opens itself.

Inside it is red, and a much smaller chamber than the one they just came from, though just as ascetic. Inside, in the center of the black stone floor: Vader. She’s seen pictures, in the history texts. Effigies in liberation day celebrations. He stands seven feet tall, cloak cascading around his shoulders to the floor, modulated breathing blending in with the noise of the distant waterfall, and he blends in to the darkness of the force around them like a shadow. He’s just-- standing there. Waiting, for them?

Ben shrugs Gabriela off, determined, if nothing else, to stand before him. To be their last chance, after--

She takes a step, and another step, and falls, and almost barfs, and rises, and stands before Vader, hugging herself, unaware of her actions, of her words. But Vader speaks first.

‘Why have you come here.’

‘Luke--’ she can’t say it. She has to say it. ‘Luke Skywalker. Tried to kill me. We hoped--’ Her vision swims, still on this side of barfing, but she looks up into the black mask. Please, let this work. Please let me rest here, or let me die here.

‘You killed Skywalker’s students?’ His voice is deep, tone indecipherable. Words slow, painfully so, and thoughtful.

Her heart leaps to her throat with everything else. But he’s a Sith Lord. He won’t care, he shouldn’t care, even though he somehow knows. ‘There was a fight. Some followed me here.’ She doesn’t know what the others are doing.

‘Tell me what you know about me.’

‘You’re a powerful Sith Lord, you used to work for the Empire. Luke couldn’t kill you. That’s all I know. I thought we could be safe here.’

‘What’s your name?’

‘Ben.’ It isn’t, but it’s the best she has.

‘Ben...’ he hesitates in thought. Time is frozen for Ben, her heart pounding in her throat, every moment agony, waiting for Vader to act, to answer or kill her where she stands. ‘Change your name...’ he says. ‘Then you can stay.’

Hope expands in her like fresh air, and she nods eagerly, and blacks out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is not betad, including by my dyslexic ass who does not reread my own work but dies like stupid, feel free to tell me abt mistakes & also abt anything else please comment i love attention


	2. Chapter 2

Ben -- not Ben, not anymore -- wakes up in a bunk, surrounded by the hum of a spaceship. An older model, judging by the tone, like the F-- an older model. Her ankle is padded in gauze and the cool sting of bacta. The air is no longer heavy and hot and thick with sulfur, but has the tinny feel of ship air. Yesterday comes blooming back to her all at once, dizzy and hazy with it even through awareness of the scene around her. Luke. Vader. The others.

She breathes in, out. It’s still slippery in her mind, resistant to being thought of directly, only providing her with snippets of memories. She stops trying. She doesn’t want to remember, anyway.

The others are here. So is Vader. His darkness spreads over the whole ship, nearly blotting out the little twinkling lights of the others, but she can still sense them. In this room with her: Shiro, and Aimee, and Elise. The former two are in the bunk opposite hers, taking quietly. Elise sits on the bunk above them, long limbs tucked in nervously, and is the one out of the three who is looking at her, noticing she's awake.

It's at that point that she notices she's alone inside her own head.

Elise bats the edge of her bunk nervously near the other two's faces, catching their attention. They look up, and then Aimee looks over. 'Ben!'

She sits up, grimacing. Her whole body aches with tiredness, her ankle throbbing inside its bacta compress, but she pushes herself sitting and faces the three of them. 'Where are we?'

Aimee: 'We, um, don't know. Lord? Vader? Asked, um, told us to come with him. He said he, uh, didn't have any food and we would have to come with him to get some.' She tugs on one of her lekku nervously. 'He also pushed Luke's shuttle into a lava flow. With the force, not his hands. So... that's that I guess.'

Not-Ben stares blankly, taking this in. The others are all looking concerned, she notices when she cares to focus her vision. Well, they deserve to. She took them here on a hope and a prayer. It was better than what they left-- but she's not thinking about that. She runs a hand through her hair, and her fingers find her padawan braid. 'Do any of you have some scissors?' she asks. 'Razor, lightsaber?' She spots her own in a pile on the floor with her cloak and boots, and reaches for it before they can answer.

'What are you--' Elise begins, but she's ignited it, sitting on the edge of the bed. It looks... paler than usual. She carefully holds it to the back of her hair, pulling the long braid out with her free hand, until through the smell of burning hair it comes loose. She drops it on the ground unceremoniously. Her blade flickers, and dies for a moment before reigniting. She looks at it. The others are looking at her.

'I  _ have _ a razor,' Elise says pointedly, and Not-Ben makes a sound almost like a laugh, small and choked. She extinguishes her blade, and Elise extracts from her sock a loose razor blade and starts sawing her own braid off. Not-Ben watches, numbly. Elise tosses it on the floor when she's finished. Shiro's follows into the pile, and Aimee's beaded headpiece attachment. They all sit quietly, looking at what they've done. Not-Ben's vision swims again.

'Do you think,' Aimee says eventually, 'That we all have to change our names? I rather like mine already. I picked it out myself.'

Not-Ben's attention refocuses on her. 'I don't know,' she says, voice still choked and rusty. 'Vader only said I did.'

'I'll change it if I need to, I'd just be sad to say goodbye to this one.' She's speaking carefully, chirpy chipperness coming through as always, but in contrast to her words, to the fact that she's not looking at any of them but at the braids on the ground: mud brown and honey and jet black and multicoloured beads. She reaches up in the silence that follows and takes the rest of her headpiece off too.

'I don't know,' Shiro says belatedly. 'It wouldn't be a bad idea though. In case they're looking for us.'

After he speaks he immediately gets up and walks out of the room. The others watch him go. Not-Ben is looking at nothing again.

She does need a new name, though. There were late nights when she couldn't sleep back at the temple, that she spent hunched over a datapad in darkness. She read so many things, some of them terrible, some of them mindless. Among the former group: baby name sites. Her guilty pleasure, letting want grip her heart as she traced over hundreds of names that weren't hers like sacred artifacts. She could take one of them now. This is her chance, even as cold fear grips the nape of her neck:  _ you've heard what they said, that wanting is bad. They'll never let you. They'll take it away. _

This isn't them, though, is it?

Conflict gnaws at her, but she's already made up her mind. She rifles through the names in her memories. Lana, Phriney, Akayla, Terpsichore, Tamara, Kore, Morning-Star, Anastasia. Names she’s turned over in her mind over months. She doesn't want anything long or hard to pronounce. Lily, Dorme, Hob, Path, Kate, Witch, Hel.

Oh. There's one, over there. Maybe that one will do. She turns it over like a coin beneath her tongue.

'Daisy,' Elise is saying. 'Daisy works for now.'

Kylo --  _ Kylo, _ Kylo! -- refocuses on her. 'It doesn't really fit,' Daisy is continuing, picking at the seam of her pants, 'But it's better.'

'I'm going to ask him if it's alright to stay Aimee,' Aimee says. 'I have some backups if he says no, though.'

'Where is he?' Kylo asks.

'Flying the ship I think. He said you shouldn't walk on that ankle, though.'

She nods. She doesn't have anything to talk to him about, no, she has everything to talk to him about-- but it can wait.

'He did say to tell him when you wake, though,' Aimee continues. 'I wonder if that's where Shiro's gone.'

Daisy scoffs cynically. 'It's not,' she says, cartoon-high pitched voice hard.

'Oh, alright. I'll go tell him, then.'

She gets up, and leaves the room, leaving Kylo with a quiet Daisy still picking at her own clothing, one leg now stretched out on the bunk. Kylo watches her hands, the movement of them, before watching the floor instead, somewhere to the left of their shorn braids.

Aimee returns with a bowl, and trailed by Gabriela. 'He said to bring you food,' Aimee says, holding out the bowl, and Kylo takes it, suddenly so hungry that she doesn't notice what she's eating until she's several bites in. Reheated muesli, unflavoured, but she doesn't care. It's gone within the minute. She looks up again at what the others are doing. Gabriela is sawing off her braid with the razor, and soon a warm brown braid joins the others on the plastic floor. Kylo stares at them all for a few seconds, vision beginning to tunnel, before she wrenches her attention away.

'Do you want more food?' Aimee asks, and she nods eagerly, so the togruta girl gets up and takes the bowl from her and leaves again. Water, would be good, also, but she doesn't have the words to ask. Pedima and Saiph come into the room before Aimee does. 'Gimme,' Pedima says without preamble, and takes the razor from Gabriela to start cutting the beaded extension woven into her fur off. It soon joins the pile on the floor, followed by Saiph's of their own thick, black hair.

'So that's that, I guess,' Pedima says, and leans back on her hands. 'You get filled in?'

Kylo nods mutely. Pedima is antsy, drumming her fingers on the covers. 'Where'd Shiro go?' Kylo asks after several long moments.

'Locked himself in the bathroom,' Pedima says, moving one hand to now drum on her knee. Kylo nods again, with no use for the information other than the slight increase of security in knowing everyone is accounted for. Daisy flops back on the covers with a small noise. Aimee comes back with more food, and Kylo devours it again, and the six of them sit in crawling silence.

'So--' Pedima begins, nervously, but that's when the door opens again.


	3. Chapter 3

Darth Vader fills the doorway, his helmet almost comically obscured by its frame. He ducks inside. They are all silent.

‘I want,’ he says, ‘To speak with you.’ He points at Kylo. Her eyes take a moment to find the end of his finger.

More silence. Pedima: ‘Should we, uh, leave then?’

‘Yes.’

He moves out of the doorway so the five of them can shuffle awkwardly out with a backwards glance or two, standing to the left of the other bunk and staying there even as the door whooshes shut. The angle of his mask falls briefly on the pile of padawan braids. Kylo looks up at him, uncertain. ‘I picked a new name.’

‘And?’

‘Kylo.’ She looks away from him in her fear, only mounting in the long pause that follows. This was a mistake, she never should have thought--

‘Naboo,’ he says, thoughtfully.

Oh. If that’s the? problem?-- her heart pounds with hope again. ‘It wasn’t-- I’m not-- I just needed a name.’

He nods, a slow incline of his head. She exhales, almost relaxes.

‘Feminine, is it not?’ he asks, and she would have not been surprised if the whiplash killed her, every muscle tense again. But then he says: ‘Should I refer to you in the feminine as well?’

An ocean of relief wipes out her body, shoulders sagging. ‘Yes,’ she breathes, without thinking about it, the mortification sinking in instantly afterwards, cringing in on herself.

‘Very well.’

She chances a glance at him, and of course there is no change in demeanor, no clue to be gained. He’s just standing there.

But she did that. She did that, and she’ll deal with it.

‘What happened?’ he asks.

She jolts at the subject change, a shiver running through her involuntarily. ‘The others didn’t tell you?’

‘They said you burst in with news of Skywalker’s betrayal.’ Kylo’s breath catches at that, too. ‘I’d like to hear what happened.’

Kylo swallows, staring at Vader’s boots, noticing he’s taken his cloak off, and unsure of what to say. Seconds tick by. She glances up at his helmet. The situation hasn’t gone away. She still doesn’t know what to say. Vader remains silent as said silence weighs heavier and heavier on the room, as one minute passes, two.

Get yourself together. Say something. Say anything. She swallows again. Very quickly, and addressed to her knees: ‘I told you. L-- He-- Skywalker tried to kill me. I was worried about the others, so I went and woke them all and told them what had happened. Some of them believed me. Some of them didn’t. Some thought I had attacked Luke in cold blood. There was a fight. People died.’ Her hand forms a fist, clenched against the bed covers. The truth, unsaid: I killed them, I killed them, I killed them. ‘I-- I took the others with me. I’d heard about you. Rumors. I figured-- you could keep us safe from Lu-- from Skywalker.’

‘What became of Skywalker?’

She glances away from her current position of not looking at Vader, settling on a new one to the left of his legs. ‘The building collapsed.’ It’s not a lie, but it is. It is.

‘Is he alive?’

‘I don’t know.’

He’s quiet for a long moment. Then, worst of all: ‘Will your family be looking for you?’

She bursts into tears. The past two days, everything that happened comes spilling out in sobs. She can’t help it. They won’t be looking for her. They won’t. She shakes her head, lips pressed hard together. She should keep it together, this is a fucking interrogation, isn’t it, she shouldn’t be losing it like this-- they need him, need his protection, she shouldn’t--

She can’t help herself. She bawls.

Vader moves after a little, slow as before, and walks out of the room. Kylo looks up, panic gripping her. Oh no. He’s mad, she broke it, she fucked this all up because she couldn’t keep it together--

And then Vader comes back, and holds out a hand towel.

She looks timidly up into the mask face, taken aback, not even quite believing what’s in front of her. Cautiously she reaches up and takes it, hand trembling. Vader returns to his spot next to the bunks across from her.

She just holds the towel uncertainly for a few seconds before making the connection and wiping her face, startled out of tears by the strange, kind action. She doesn’t quite dare look at him again, scared of breaking things when they so miraculously seem to have survived. Instead she holds the towel and looks at the floor, still trembling softly.

‘I’m going to protect you,’ he says, and she does look up at that, startled again. ‘You will all be safe here.’

She nods, a little vacantly, astounded by her good luck, head too full to recount or notice all the good lucks that have come to pass in this single conversation, a little dizzy with it.

‘You will relay this to the others.’

‘Y--yes.’

‘Very well, Kylo.’

Her heart swims. He leaves the room.

She stifles another sob in her hands as he does, crying for a couple more minutes before pulling herself together. There’s nothing to fall apart about anymore. They’re all going to be safe. She can stop shaking now.

It takes her a couple more minutes to do so.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> bless henry bernberg, creator of the star wars galaxy map

After a bit there’s a knock on the door and Aimee pokes her head inside. ‘He said we should give you a few minutes and then-- Are you alright?’

Kylo sniffles, aware of her red and blotchy face, even after getting the tears to stop. ‘Yeah.’ She takes a deep breath. ‘I’m fine. We’re, uh, all fine, actually. He said he’ll protect us from Luke.’ She-- smiles, actually, without forcing it, for the first time in who knows how long, and lets out a breath. They’re safe. They can rest.

‘Really? That’s wonderful!’ Aimee enters the room proper, the others, including an equally red-eyed Shiro, spilling in after her.

Daisy leans against the edge of the bunks, inches from where Vader was just standing. ‘So what’s the catch?’

Kylo shrugs. ‘He didn’t say. Just that he’s willing to protect us.’

‘Great.’ Daisy picks at her sleeve agitatedly.

Gabriela: ‘I don’t know if the catch has anything to do with us. Maybe he just hates Luke. They did, uh, try to kill each other and everything.’

Kylo says, firmly, ‘I think it will be fine.’

They quiet. Daisy opens her mouth, shuts it. Crosses her arms.

Saiph types in their text to speech, miraculously survived this trip safely lanyarded around their neck: ‘If it’s not, then we go somewhere else.’

Daisy: ‘We can’t overpower that guy.’

‘I didn’t think we would have been able to overpower Luke, either,’ Aimee pipes up. ‘This is probably safer than trying to strike out on our own. Besides, this feels auspicious to me.’

There was another option, Kylo thinks. There was another option, but she chose this one blindly in her panic. And her head is now quiet, almost stiflingly so; as the overwhelming aspect leaves her so that again makes itself clear. As though that gate has been closed by her mindless decision.

‘This guy clearly has some experience evading the authorities,’ Gabriela says. ‘I think we should stick with him, at least until he gives us a reason not to.’

‘I was lucky to get the drop on Luke,’ Kylo says, a lump forming in her throat that she tries to ignore. ‘If he has it out for us, this is where we’re safest. He’s a Sith. He’s not going to care that we’re a bunch of ex-Jedi younglings.’

Daisy, again: ‘Didn’t the Sith, um, kill people?’

‘Yeah, and the Jedi don’t.’ Kylo retorts, her voice hard with cynicism. She’s getting fed up with this doubt. She made a decision for them all. It turned out to be a good one. The silence echoes.

Saiph: ‘This shuttle doesn’t have escape pods. At any rate, we’re stuck here until we next make planetfall.’

Pedima: ‘I think he seems pretty good. He fed us and cleaned us up and all.’

Daisy is quiet now, sulking, not looking at any of them. Saiph: ‘It’d still be nice to know where he’s taking us.’

Gabriela: ‘Then why don’t one of us just go and ask?’

A couple people turn and look at her. ‘I’ll do it, then,’ she says, and gets up and leaves the room. They’re quiet for several moments in her absence, Daisy hugging herself tighter, Shiro crying again silently. Aimee hugs him.

Pedima: ‘Cheer up, guys. At least it’s better than staying with Luke, after... that...’

Daisy puffs out an angry breath. ‘Oh come on. Don’t tell me it hasn’t occurred to any of you what uses a big strong guy like him could have for a bunch of helpless kids.’

‘Oh, it has,’ Pedima replies. ‘I, just, uh, we’re just as likely to end up with someone terrible with any other rando, right? And he seems pretty nice. And can beat off Luke if it comes to that.’

‘I already said it feels auspicious,’ Aimee says. ‘I don’t think he’s going to do anything bad to us.’

Sapih types, ‘Maybe we could come up with a backup plan.’

‘You all don’t GET IT!’ Daisy yells, throwing her hands in the air. ‘There. Will. Be. Nothing. We can do. To stop him. He’s seven fucking feet tall and Luke Skywalker couldn’t kill him. He’s stronger in the force than any of us. He probably has his own lightsaber.’ Gabriela comes back in, and edges awkwardly to the side. Daisy continues: ‘Our best bet is to sneak off as soon as we land.’

Saiph: ‘Maybe keep your voice down on that, Daisy,’ at the same time as Pedima points out, ‘Ben can’t walk.’

‘Oh,’ Kylo says. ‘My name is Kylo now.’

Everyone stares at her.

She shrugs. ‘It had to come out sooner or later.’

‘What the fuck were you thinking, bringing us here,’ Daisy says, focused on Kylo now, fat tears spilling out of her eyes.

‘I was thinking he’s the only person in the galaxy who can hide us from Luke Skywalker.’ Not the only one, not the only one.

Shiro, quietly: ‘For what it’s worth I think Daise has a point. But I don’t know where else we’re supposed to go.’

‘Thank you,’ Daisy spits, wiping her eyes.

Kylo: ‘We’re going to have to take a leap of faith with anyone. That’s just how it is. We don’t have anyone we can trust to take us in. So we might as well be safe in one aspect.’ She’s still a little mad, certain that this is a good thing they’ve found. But seeing Daisy break down about it cools her heels and keeps her from snapping again. Daisy just wants to be safe, just like the rest of them.

Daisy’s attempts to clear her eyes aren’t going so well. ‘I’d rather take a chance on someone we could overpower together if we had to,’ she says, sulkily.

Kylo feels the spark of irritation again, loathe to admit she has a point. ‘Well like Saiph said, we’re stuck here for now. Might as well see how it goes.’ It comes off more snappish than she intends, and Daisy’s face screws in anger, though she doesn’t say anything.

Gabriela pipes up. ‘He says we’re currently planet hopping as he’s not sure of a secure place to head to. We’re bound for Thakwaa next.’

‘Did we stop anywhere else?’ Kylo asks, pulling up a mental map. They’re headed galactic standard west. Not much else there unless Vader plans to either take them in circles or dip north into the mid rim. They’re already on the edge of wild space.

‘Yes, but we didn’t ask where.’

Kylo nods. It doesn’t really matter to her where they go, as long as it’s away from what they left behind.

‘I don’t even know where Thakwaa is,’ Daisy says despairingly.

‘Outer rim, west of Mustafar,’ Kylo supplies.

‘I admit,’ Saiph types, ‘That I expected you to take us to a safe house of some kind instead of into another strange force user’s care.’

Oh, not them too. Her nerves spike again. ‘How much safer of a house do you want?’

‘We already got fucked over once,’ Daisy says. ‘Forgive us for being less than thrilled with the situation you led us into blindly.’

‘It wasn’t you who got fucked over!’ Kylo snaps, temper letting loose. ‘He was my uncle, okay, my fucking  _ uncle _ \--’ she can’t talk, suddenly, throat completely void of air. She chokes a little, again crying. ‘You,’ she says, fighting to get the words out, ‘All chose to come with me. And I’m staying here.’

She stands up, forgetting momentarily about her ankle before it stabs with pain. But she stays standing, so she storms out of the room, despite a soft, ‘No, don’t do that...’ from Gabriela’s corner.

The ship’s combined living and kitchen area feels to open, too easily intruded upon, so she goes into a door she suspects and finds correctly is the bathroom, and locks it before collapsing onto the toilet in tears. She’s not sure what she’s thinking about, or why she’s so certain Vader’s the right choice. Hell, he probably isn’t. Daisy’s probably right, and he’s going to come after them just like Luke did, or worse. Now she’s not sure about anything, and her ankle hurts like hell, and she probably went and pissed off all of them, even Aimee who seems perpetually unpissoffable. She doesn’t know anything. Her head is rattlingly empty, their only other option seemingly abandoning them. Not that Daisy or Saiph or any of them would likely be any more content with a spectre in her head.

She sits there and cries quietly into her hands.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> suicide ment & canon typical child abuse ment in this one boys
> 
> also gesy are an original species, in case youre like me and instantly google any new star wars words
> 
> i didnt sleep last night lol

Dinner is a quiet affair. Vader is still shut up in the cockpit, but Gabriela came and found Kylo and helped her to the dining table. They eat reconstituted potatoes with protein powder Aimee and Pedima prepared for them, each contained in their own quietness, scattered across the small sitting and dining area. Daisy is still sulking. Saiph looks lost in thought. Shiro is tucked in small, sitting next to a blithely silent Aimee, sitting next to a still antsy Pedima, drumming her fingers on the arm of the sofa. Gabriela is calm next to Kylo, eating her potatoes without appearing to think much about anything but them.

Kylo sighs and leans heavily on the table. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘You’re right, Daisy. We don’t know shit.’

Daisy peers up at her. She sighs too. ‘It’s okay Kylo. It’s not your fault. We just still can’t do anything about it.’ She picks at her pants seams.

‘He seemed, um,’ Gabriela says, ‘Like maybe he’d be willing to answer our questions? He wasn’t cagey about where we were going at all.’

‘Sure, if he ever comes out of the cockpit,’ Saiph types. The neutral automated voice always seems to carry the cynicism well despite or perhaps due to its tonelessness.

Pedima: ‘Well, he has to pee eventually. Maybe.’

Saiph: ‘I doubt it,’ in time with a snort of laughter from Shiro.

‘If he’s so nice and friendly, why don’t we just ask him to come out?’ Daisy says sardonically. ‘Y’all do realise he could still be biding his time, right?’ A little quieter, with a nervous glance to the cockpit door.

‘Absolutely,’ Gabriela says smoothly. ‘But as we pointed out, we don’t have a choice. Might as well try to get facts on the table. I can ask him, to come talk to us once the ship is safely in autopilot.’ She gets up, though as she does Kylo recognises the telltale shift in air pressure that means they’re entering atmo.

‘Not right now, we’re landing,’ she says, and Gabriela looks back at her curiously.

‘How can you tell?’

‘Pressure shift. We just entered atmo.’

Gabriela looks around the spaceship with interest, as though trying to visually identify the change in air. ‘You can tell the difference?’ Shiro asks.

‘Uh-huh.’ That train of thought hurts to think about and she nips it in the bud. ‘Let’s just wait for him to land and then come out.’ She hunches back over her potatoes.

Pedima sighs. ‘Well, hopefully he’ll get us some better food when we land. He didn’t even let us leave the ship last time. You were asleep for that, Kylo.’

Gabriela: ‘Are... you an obligate carnivore?’

‘Sort of,’ Pedima says with another sigh. ‘I’m half gesy on my mom’s side.’ She pushes her potatoes around with her fork despondently. ‘Are you?’

‘No, I’m just devaronian. Regular carnivorism. We should, uh, tell him. If we’re not coming with again.’

‘Right. I would kill for some meat right now. Literally.’

‘Agreed,’ says Aimee.

Kylo knows she won’t be coming with, with her ankle, and idly wonders if they’ll be all left here together, and if so if they should steal the ship. She can fly most things, and Pedima knows her way around a console. It would get them away, like Daisy wants. But it would leave them vulnerable, like she herself doesn’t want. And the last thing they need is to make an enemy of Vader. She’ll point that out to the others, if they are left here alone. Sneaking off might still be an option: she walked on her hurt ankle to get here, and though she isn’t convinced Vader’s a threat, she has to admit that after everything with Luke they might be better safe than sorry. But they’ll be sorrier still if Luke, or the authorities, find them.

So she’s still gravitating towards staying, but it feels like they’ve already argued their points. Maybe they just need to talk about it again, though, or else sit here in silence, or else split up.

She doesn’t love the idea, but really, the only thing tying these people to her is they were the ones who believed her. Who thought her life was worth fighting for.

Maybe it isn’t such an only.

The others have fallen quiet from their conversation about food. Kylo has long since finished her own potatoes, too hungry at present to be fussy, mind blank now that that avenue has been thought through and explored, coasting on blankness all over. Her ankle hurts.

Eventually the spaceship touches firmly down on solid ground, shaking them all slightly, and Vader emerges from the cockpit. Everyone’s attention turns to him. ‘I’m going to gather more supplies and information,’ he says. ‘You all wait here.’

At least he trusts that they’re not going to steal his ship, or doesn’t think them capable of it, or thinks them too smart to. Pedima pipes up, ‘Um, sir?’ He looks at her. She continues, ‘Could you... buy us some foods that are somewhat more meat adjacent? Some of us are carnivores.’

He looks at her for a long moment, and she squirms, but then he says, ‘I will. Do any of you require anything else?’

Information, Kylo thinks out of the blankness, but doesn’t say it. She doesn’t know what she needs to know. Nobody says anything else, either. ‘Then you will wait here,’ Vader says, and sweeps from the ship.

Silence swells in his absence, following the sound of the gangplank lowering, and the click of him locking the ship behind him. Daisy breaks it. ‘So are we leaving or not.’

‘Kylo can’t walk,’ Pedima reiterates.

‘He did before.’

‘I’m, uh. She/her now. Actually.’ She might as well say it, if they’re leaving anyway. If Vader didn’t react badly.

They all look at her. Gabriela beams. ‘Wonderful. I am he/him. I was wondering if I should get around to sharing that.’

Kylo smiles a little despite herself. ‘Cool,’ she says, and means it, a little bubble of warmth in her chest. Gabriela has the grin of someone simultaneously over the moon and at the end of his rope. ‘Are you okay?’ Kylo asks.

‘It,’ he says, in his lilting accented voice, ‘Has been a very long couple of days.’

There’s nothing to say to that but nod vacantly in agreement. Daisy repeats, ‘So are we leaving or not?’

Saiph: ‘Do we know if there’s anywhere else to go here?’

Gabriela: ‘There’s at least a market. We may be able to find passage on another ship, but then we’d be little better off than we are here.’

Pedima: ‘I don’t think we should go until we know where we’re going. Here we get food, shelter, and safety from Luke.’ Ticking off on her fingers. ‘We just walk out, we don’t know what’s going to happen.’

Kylo notices not one of them has mentioned splitting up. Perhaps they, like her, thought about it and dismissed it. They’re together now, the seven of them, for the foreseeable future at least.

Daisy groans. ‘Fine. Fine.’ She gets up and starts pacing. ‘We’re staying. For now. And my name’s not Daisy anymore. It’s lame. I’m Trigger.’

‘Okay, Trigger,’ Pedima says, resting her head on her arms on the arm of the sofa. ‘This is gonna be a long wait, isn’t it.’

Shiro: ‘It’s not like it’s any different when we’re in space.’ He’s still quiet, small, subdued.

‘Good point.’

Kylo turns her attention away from that lot to Gabriela. They were alike, all this time, never sharing with one another. If they had sooner, maybe-- she doesn’t want to think about that. They have, now. She wonders if he, too, stayed up late pouring over baby name sites, tasting the way each new name felt, mouthing them in the dark, or if Gabriela suits him just fine. It’s feminine, usually, but that doesn’t have to matter. He catches her looking and smiles. It’s still a little vacant, a little manic, but she smiles back, her own small but as steady as the circumstance can manage.

Saiph asks, ‘So where did you hear about this Vader guy, anyway, Kylo?’

‘Mmn?’ She looks over at them. ‘Oh, from Luke. I overheard him talking to my mom. About how Vader was on Mustafar, taking to ground in his castle from the days of the Empire. I mean you all have heard  _ of _ him, right?’

‘Not really,’ Aimee says. ‘I grew up without a whole lot of technology. My village really only up and moved as a whole a couple years ago. You said he used to work for the Empire?’

Kylo nods. ‘Yeah. He was the Emperor’s main enforcer, everyone was afraid of him.’

‘Then him being kind to us is indicative of more than I thought.’

She furrows her brow. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, if he’s generally a terrible person, that must mean he really likes us, right?’

‘Not... necessarily.’ Shiro says quietly. ‘He could be, like. Luring us into a false sense of security or something. Maybe he wants force sensitives for something.’

‘Like what?’ Pedima asks, looking concerned.

‘I don’t know. People come up with all sorts of terrible uses for other people.’ He rubs the back of his neck. ‘I-- don’t really want to think about the possibilities. I just don’t think we’re in the clear really. Who takes in a bunch of kids out of nowhere?’

‘Luke,’ Kylo says without thinking, and the silence is deafening.

‘My point,’ Shiro says, softly.

‘Okay, but like, why did Luke even do that,’ Pedima says. ‘Really like, why.’

‘I don’t know,’ Kylo says, panic climbing her throat. Does she? The fear in Luke’s eyes, in her mother’s, whenever they look at her, quickly hidden? Her increased failure at meditation, at keeping the darkness Luke noted in her under control? That time when she lashed out at another student the other day, bo staff sending blood flying from their nose in an instant in exchange for a sly glance? Did she ask too much of him? Did she complain too much? Want too badly to go home? Express one too many times her reluctance to become a Jedi, her preference of doing anything, anything else, of being anywhere else but there? One eye roll, one ignored question over the line? Was she too sulky? Too quiet? Too loud? Too much of a burden? Did she eat too much, grow out clothes too quickly? Want things too badly? Feel things too deeply? Feel the things she was supposed to not enough? Did he know, when she said she loved him too, that she didn’t mean it? Did he know about how often she thought about wanting to die, and thought he’d do it for her?

Her eyes are defocused. She’s aware of noise, but not what’s being said; of movement but not what’s being done. She’s crying. She’s been crying even more than usual these past couple days.

A hand touches her shoulder and before she knows what she’s doing she’s pinned Aimee to the ground, one hand around her throat. Aimee’s clear blue eyes are wide and shocked behind her round glasses. The eye contact brings Kylo slowly back to reality, and she releases her and gets up. ‘I’m-- sorry,’ she chokes, crying still. Aimee blinks, shocked. Kylo doesn’t know what to do. This is why he tried to kill you, she thinks. Moments like these.

Aimee sits up, shaking herself. ‘It’s okay, Kylo, I didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to touch you. No harm done.’ She rubs her back lekku. ‘I think. No worries if it is though. It’ll just be a bruise.’

Kylo’s taken aback, still gasping for air between tears. ‘I didn’t mean to--’ She should offer her a hand up, that would be the good and right thing to do. Instead she’s stuck vaguely grasping at her own arms in a semblance of a hug, and even her own touch hurts her skin, feels wrong, feels bad, but she’s not sure how to stop, or move.

‘It’s okay!’ Aimee reassures her. ‘I know you didn’t. That was dumb of me anyway.’ She gets to her feet. ‘I think we could all use some tea. I’m going to see if I can make some tea.’

She goes to the kitchen. Kylo is left standing there, staring blankly and hurting. The others are talking, possibly about her. Someone leaves the room for the bunks.

Aimee approaches her again after a few minutes, this time stopping a few feet away. ‘We don’t have any tea, but I made hot water.’ She holds out a steaming mug with both hands, her sleeves pulled down over her palms as makeshift oven mitts.

Kylo looks down at the mug of hot water, and feels like crying, and this time doesn’t. She takes it, heedless of the heat. Aimee nods in a little confirmation and walks away again. Kylo stares into the depths of the cup. It’s a plastic mug, one designed to be hard to break. Steam rises from it, but beneath the steam, it’s only clear water. She sips it, burning her mouth, and the warmth in her chest almost feels nice.

Eventually she turns her head to look at the others. Gabriela is sitting on the couch, with Saiph perched on the back of it at the other end. Trigger is at the table with Aimee. Shiro isn’t in the room. Pedima is walking around, not quite an anxious pace, more a caged bear.

God, they probably all hate her. For what she did to Aimee just now; for what she did to Luke. For what she did to all of them in bringing them here. She doesn’t know what to do with herself. She doesn’t know what to do next.

What she ends up doing is watching them all quietly, and letting her vision drift, until Vader returns.


	6. Chapter 6

Kylo wound up sitting on the floor at some point, sooner rather than later, her ankle giving up in protest, and she’s there still when Vader comes back. They all stop their conversations as they hear the gangplank lower, watching Vader walk into the room. He’s carrying and floating several wooden crates, incongruous to his battle armor. ‘I brought you food and clothing,’ he says, setting the boxes he’s carrying with the force down in the living room, and taking the other couple to the table.

Trigger peers up nervously at him. ‘Thank you!’ Aimee says, smiling brightly. He looks at her. Her smile falters only a little. Pedima is already digging through one of the boxes.

Gabriela looks straight at Vader, unflinching. 'Sir, what are we doing? Where are we going?'

'I have already told you. We are planet hopping until I conceive of a better plan.' He's quiet for a moment, then: 'How many of you will have people looking for you?'

A moment of hesitation, then Gabriela and Saiph's hands go up. Trigger's goes up halfway, shyly. Aimee makes a so-so hand. Pedima jerks a thumb at Aimee. 'What she said.' Shiro, drawn back into the main room by the noise, is unmoving over by the door to the bunks. Kylo's already answered this question, but inactivity is her answer all the same.

'Then we will avoid planets with good information flow. I will begin looking for a suitable location. We will likely not stay there permanently, but it will be less likely to draw attention than if we keep moving around. Do any of you have requests regarding biomes?'

Silence again. Pedima pipes up, 'Woods are um, nice.' Gabriela nods.

'Rain,' Kylo says, voice rusty and barely sounding like her own. 'I like rain.'

Vader looks at her, and nods. 'That will be accomodated.' He heads back to the cockpit.

'Um, sir,' Gabriela pipes up. 'Once you have the ship in autopilot, would you come talk to us? We'd like to ask you some questions.'

He stops, and looks over his shoulder at the lot of them. Kylo's beginning to get used to the long pauses before he responds. 'I will,' he says.

'Okay,' Gabriela says, nodding. 'Thank you.'

'Is that all?'

'Um, yes, for now.'

Vader turns away again and disappears into the cockpit. They all sit in uncertain silence, before Pedima goes back to rummaging through boxes. 'These clothes are badass as shit.' She holds up a fur cloak.

Saiph: 'We should determine what we want to ask him. I'd like to know what the long term plan is, if there is one.'

Gabriela: 'It doesn't sound like there is. Still, we can confirm. It sounds like he's just going to find us a planet to lay low on.'

'I want to know what the official news is,' Trigger says. 'Regarding... us, and...' she trails off.

'I don't know if we'll be able to get that on a planet with poor information flow. Or if there will even be an official statement yet,' Saiph types.

Trigger nods. 'Just... eventually. Sooner, hopefully, instead of later.' She's sitting hunched down, one hand on the back of her neck.

Aimee is rustling through the crate beside her. 'Okay but who wants real dinner?'

'Me, absolutely,' says Gabriela. 'Do you want help?'

'Sure!'

Gabriela trots over the kitchen to join her unpacking the food. Pedima has draped herself in furs like a little kid under a blanket. Saiph: 'I think we should ask about where we're going and what his long term intentions are.'

'Agreed,' says Pedima, only her snout poking out. 'And if he has any good moves for evading the cops.'

'I'd like to ask him how he feels about all of this,' says Aimee, muffled briefly from tearing open a package with her teeth. 'He's very stoic, isn't he.'

Trigger barks a laugh almost more like a sob. 'Are you holding up alright, Trigger?' Aimee asks, looking down at her still seated. She shrugs.

Gabriela: 'We could just point blank ask him about why he's taken us in. See what he says, at least.'

Pedima, now under several layers: 'Guys why does nobody else care about this cool ass fuzzy stuff.'

Shiro has disappeared quietly back into the bedroom. Kylo looks in that direction, then back to the others. Then back to the closed door. She gets up and hops over to it.

Shiro is inside, sitting on a lower bunk, hugging himself. Kylo braces herself against the doorframe. 'Are you okay?' Her voice is still low, odd to her own ears.

Shiro shrugs and quickly wipes his eyes and sits up regularly. 'I'm, uh, fine.'

'You're lying.'

He looks at her, glancing up shyly through his lashes. 'Yeah.'

She doesn't... really know what to do from there. She sighs. 'I can't do anything to help,' she says, honestly. 'I just wanted to check on you.'

He nods. 'Um. I. This'll probably be good, yeah?'

She nods too. 'Yeah. I think so. I think he's gonna keep us safe.'

Shiro nods again, looking at the floor. Their pile of padawan braids is still there. 'Should probably do something with those, huh,' he says.

'Not like we need to keep them,' she agrees, but they both are still and quiet after that. Her mind feels so, so empty.

‘I, um. Was thinking I should change my name too,’ he says.

Seems a good time for it. ‘What to?’

‘I have a shortlist.’ Now studying his hands. ‘I was thinking, um, Korrum.’

‘Korrum,’ she says, trying it out.

Korrum nods. ‘Yeah.’

‘Good name.’

‘Thanks. I like yours too.’

‘Thanks.’

They’re quiet.

'Oh, fuck,' Korrum says, 'Your ankle. Come sit down.'

'Oh. Right.' Kylo had been balancing on one foot using the doorframe. She hops over to sit across from Korrum instead, and the silence renews before Korrum laughs softly.

'What is it?' Kylo asks.

'Us.' There's still a breath of laughter in the word.

'What about us?' She doesn't get it.

Korrum shakes his head. 'Just... everything.'

She's still blanking but it feels impudent to keep asking. Instead she just keeps looking at him, idly, mind once again blank. He's small, smaller than all of them except Pedima; slender. Human, or maybe part-human, with those canines. Kylo has always enjoyed watching people's teeth.

'What's... on your mind?' she says slowly, as though remembering a script.

Korrum looks up from the floor again. He shrugs. 'Just... everything,' he says again, and this time she understands. She nods, and doesn't say anything else, not sure if she should, or if that would also curse her to have thoughts.

From the main room Aimee calls, 'Dinner time!'

Kylo starts a little, and braces against the bunks to get to her feet.


	7. Chapter 7

Among Vader's purchases is a large fish, now cooked and served in the center of the table. Kylo looks at it dazedly; she didn't realise that much time had passed. She's interrupted in the mob around the table for her distraction, though doesn't mind, waiting for everyone to disperse enough for her to plop down in one of the dining chairs screwed to the floor, and serve herself from there. It's good. Minimally seasoned and a little undercooked, but it's real food, and she's hungry. Several of her friends are wearing fur cloaks, more or less where they’re intended to be worn.

Huh. Her friends. Maybe.

They're all settling down with their dishes when the cockpit door opens and Vader fills the frame. They all look up.

‘I have placed the ship in autopilot,’ he says.

‘Oh, um, come sit down then!’ Aimee says.

He does, walking over to the table and sitting across from Kylo. She glances at him, slowly chewing her forkful of fish. He’s had to fold himself in a little, chair not intended to accommodate such long legs. ‘What is it you wanted to ask me?’ he asks the room at large.

Saiph instantly starts typing. ‘Is there a long term plan?’

‘No. I have already told you about what plan there is.’

‘What will we do when we reach a suitable planet?’

‘Establish what is available for shelter and income and make use of it. This ship is not suitable for you all to live on. There is one bunk too few. If need be we can acquire another cot. But I am hoping we will be able to find lodgings planetside.’

Pedima: ‘Aren’t you worried they’ll catch up to us?’

‘There are many places in the outer rim where the arm of galactic law cannot reach. The fledgling Republic has enough of a job keeping its own members together and under control. They cannot search everywhere. And they do not know I am with you.’

Saiph again: ‘Is there a way to get a message to my mother? I’d like to let her know I’m safe.’

Vader is quiet for a longer pause than usual before saying, ‘Where does she live?’

‘Brentaal.’

‘That may be too far into the core to get a message to safely. I will see what I can do.’

Saiph gives Vader a hard look. ‘Stop being vague. What are my options.’

Vader is quiet for a few moments more while Kylo and the others look upon Saiph with a mixture of nervousness and awe. Saiph is not breaking eye contact with Vader, or what passes for it. ‘Your best bet would be to use an unregistered communications device to contact her anonymously, and then destroy said device. I will try to acquire it for you. You will need to use it in a different location from where it was acquired.’

‘Thank you. When will we be let off this ship?’

‘When I have deemed it safe. I cannot make the purchases we need and keep myself hidden while also hiding all of you. I am setting about finding us somewhere to set up camp for the time being, but we also need to focus on creating a trail that cannot be followed.’

‘And what if we want to leave?’

‘You may leave if you wish. However, you came to me for protection. I intend to give it. If you leave, you will be on your own.’

‘Why are you doing this?’

They’re all quiet, watching Saiph in awe as they unabashedly conduct the interrogation, their brown face blank of everything except adamancy. Vader takes a long time to answer again.

‘You came to me requesting help,’ he says eventually. ‘You are children. I will not turn you away.’

‘So it’s a matter of personal code?’

‘I have not pretended to have a moral code since before the fall of the Republic and I will not now. No, it is a matter of personal interest. I have suffered much, and it has been a long time since anyone has touched me with anything so personal as a request for help. Luke Skywalker once repaired my mistakes. Now I will repair his. Call it what you like. Call it kindness, or atonement, or indeed, morals. It only is what it is.’

It’s their turn to all be quiet, shocked. Kylo’s throat is dry. Luke fixed his mistakes? Luke tried to kill him. That’s why they’re here. If he has any sort of good will towards Luke--

‘What do you mean, Luke repaired your mistakes?’ Saiph asks.

‘You have noted that I served the Empire. You have also noted that Luke failed to kill me. This was not due to a lack of skill on his part. He made a choice.’ Vader hesitates, as do they all. ‘By refusing to kill me, he introduced me to the error of my ways, not to mention his and the Rebellion’s defeat of Emperor Palpatine and of the Empire undid a lot of damage I helped to cause. I am... dismayed to learn of his betrayal of all of you. I thought him better than that. So it seems the tables have turned.’

Kylo’s mind is racing, thoughts as they’ve been recently too slippery to quite hold onto, or make sense of. It sounds like the Luke she’d thought she’d known: too good to be true, all holy light and purity, story praised to the outer rim and back. She wonders why she’s never heard Luke saved Vader. It would fit right into their little story--

And if he saved Vader, why did he see fit to kill her?

She feels like nothing, like garbage, like mold on something forgotten’s underbelly. She should be dead right now. Luke Skywalker thought she deserved it.

Saiph isn’t finished. ‘Will you be contacting Luke?’

‘No. That would endanger all of you. My primary interest is your safety.’

‘You can understand why the news of this connection between you is troubling.’

‘I can. Rest assured, I know the danger is real. Luke may have spared me, but there are ways in which he never forgave me. Whether or not I forgive him for this is irrelevant. To lead him to any of you would place you in danger. I will not allow it to happen.’

Pedima pipes up. ‘Um, Mr Vader--’ He turns his head to look at her. She continues, ‘Luke should be able to sense us all in the force, if he’s close enough, right? How are we going to stop him from finding us?’

‘As I have said, he does not know I am with you. I am using my force presence to mask all of yours. If he looks, he will sense only me.’

‘Oh, okay. Thank you for that.’

‘I am doing all I can to protect all of you. I do not know if it will be enough. But know that no-one will be able to lay a hand on any of you while I am around.’

Silence, again. Kylo’s lost between feelings, unsure of what she’s thinking or doing, second dinner forgotten. The awful feeling of Luke’s betrayal made new, now wonderment at Vader’s words, feeling she ought to mistrust this, but never having felt safer. Still wondering, quietly, where Snoke has gone. Still wondering what it was she did wrong enough to wake up with a lightsaber over her.

‘Thank you,’ Aimee says, earnestly. ‘For all of this.’

‘You are welcome. Do you have any more questions?’

‘Do you eat?’ Pedima asks.

He looks at her again and she squirms a little. ‘No,’ he says. ‘My suit delivers nutrients to my body intravenously. I need only replenish the suit’s supply. This is why I had no food available for you on Mustafar.’

She nods, still looking embarrassed. ‘Okay.’

Vader turns to Saiph. ‘In a similar vein: I will be able to improve your prosthetics if you allow me to. I have spent several decades improving my own prosthetics and with access to certain materials I can synthesize something above market quality. I can also build you a telepathic text to speech device.’

Saiph blinks. ‘I’d like to see the specifics of what you have in mind before agreeing to anything, but I’m interested in the legs, certainly. These ones suit me fine, but I won’t turn down improvements, and given that Luke paid for their upgrade I wouldn’t mind changing them up somewhat. I will think about the text to speech device. I am reluctant to use what I do already, but as it is a convenience I am willing to bow to, so I might also accept a somewhat more convenient one.’

Vader nods. ‘I do not have access to any of my old schematics; I will need to redraw them. I will show you when I do. Is there a method of communication you prefer?’

‘Alderaanian sign, failing that basic sign language.’

Vader is quiet for a few moments. ‘You are Alderaanian.’

‘My mother is.’ They look him in the face, eyes hard, unabashed, unrelenting. Kylo knows why; she thought everyone knew why, though apparently Aimee doesn’t. She doesn’t feel the same about it, but then again she never loved her mother. It doesn’t make her angry or defiant to think about, just queasy, and vacant.

Vader is quiet again before saying, ‘I am familiar with basic sign. You may use that if you wish. My helmet contains translators, but they are out of date and often fail to pick up nonverbal forms of communication, so I will not be able to understand Alderaanian sign.’

Saiph signs in basic, <Okay.>

‘I do not hold you in contempt for your heritage. The destruction of Alderaan was an act of military strategy and not hatred. I understand if you hold this against me. I will protect you regardless. It is what it is.’

Face still set they sign, <My thoughts exactly.>

Vader nods. ‘If there are no more questions I will return to the cockpit.’

Nobody says anything, so he gets up and sweeps from the room.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> yall don't know the sheer willpower that went into not making vader say "it seems the turns have tabled"
> 
> also, my cat, obi-wan, thought i should add this to the chapter (it goes after "where does she live") :
> 
> ``````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````y67uaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaag


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> upd8ed the warnings at the beginning now that i have my ducks in a bit more of a row, none of them apply this chapter i'm just working on what's gonna be what. will update them more in future probably.

In the silence that follows Aimee turns to Trigger. ‘Do you feel any better about all this?’

Trigger shrugs uncomfortably. ‘I mean. You all were right about him hiding us from Luke, at least.’

Gabriela: ‘I feel there’s a good chance he was being genuine. We’ll have to wait and see of course, but so far he seems true to his word.’

‘It’s only been two days.’

‘Why are you so sure this is gonna go badly, anyway, Trig?’ Pedima asks. Trigger’s hackles raise instantly, shoulders hunched like an angry cat.

‘I don’t know! Why are you all so relaxed about it? Why don’t any of you see how much this screams bad idea? I don’t wanna get stuck between a rock and a hard place. Luke has me jumpy, okay, I-- He’s a war criminal! Jeez!’ She gets up and starts pacing.

Kylo watches her blankly. It didn’t occur to her that there was anything going on there besides reasonable wariness until now, but her response seems like six excuses at once. Huh. It gives her thoughts a brief distraction from the tangled mess of emptiness they otherwise are.

‘I’m not relaxed about it,’ Saiph types. ‘I’m keeping my eyes open. But our hands are tied, so I’m staying calm.’

Trigger rounds on them. ‘Oh, look at Mx Reasonable over here! Mx I’m so calm and stoic and so smart and know everything!’ Her voice cracks, already high pitched voice shriller with every word to near incomprehensibility.

‘Don’t come at me about this. Vader is the reason I don’t have grandparents.’ Their hazel eyes are hard behind their black-framed glasses. ‘I’ve just thought about it. I’ve made a decision. Which you don’t appear to be able to do.’

‘I’ve made a goddamn decision! It’s all of you who don’t agree with me!’

‘Then why are you still here?’

The tension in the room reaches breaking point. Trigger appears frozen for a moment. Then she walks over and slaps them, the noise of it ringing in the silence.

‘Please, guys, don’t fight--’ Aimee says, getting up but hesitating, eyes big and nervous. Saiph doesn’t seem inclined to retaliate, just looking at Trigger with a murderous sort of cynicism.

‘You think I should fucking leave, bitch?’ Kylo can barely distinguish the words. Trigger has started crying. ‘You think I should go and strike it out on my fucking own so they can come and get me and send me back to him and let me fucking suffer and die and die and die--’ she freezes, and then screws her face up with tears, bawling.

‘I don’t think you should leave,’ Aimee says.

Trigger screams, hugging her elbows. It sounds like a teakettle, like some sort of electronic alarm, earsplitting. Gabriela claps his hands over his ears, wincing, and Pedima’s are flat back. Korrum slunk back out of the room at some point. And the door to the cockpit whooshes open again, revealing Vader filling the doorframe. Trigger keeps screaming, her eyes tight shut.

‘What happened?’ Vader asks as he ducks through the door, hard to hear, but his deep voice cuts through the high scream enough to make out.

‘They’re fighting--’ Pedima starts, but then quickly claps a hand over her own mouth. Aimee is crying too, though if she’s making any noise it’s lost. Kylo is barely even bothered by the screaming, though her ears have started to ring, mostly just marvelling at Trigger’s sheer lung power.

Vader stands outside the cockpit door, apparently at just as much of a loss as the rest of them, but after a few moments he says, ‘Quiet.’ When the screaming continues he repeats it, loud now, imperious, voice booming and echoing like a gun blast.  _ ‘Quiet.’ _

They’re all quiet, even Trigger, though her eyes are still screwed shut. She stands there, shoulders tense and whole self quivering. Vader walks over to her. ‘Look at me,’ he says, volume back to normal but voice still impossibly commanding. Trigger flinches, keeps her eyes closed, trying to retreat without moving, trying to cringe in on herself and disappear. Saiph is watching. Aimee is crying silently, her hand over her mouth. Pedima is shell shocked. Gabriela looks frayed to breaking.

‘Look at me,’ Vader repeats, and Trigger relents, peering up at him with endless apprehension, still flinched in. ‘Sit.’ He points at the table.

They shuffle over in tiny movements and sit, kitty corner from Kylo. Vader points at Aimee. ‘I bought tea. Prepare some.’

Aimee nods frightendly and scampers over to the kitchen to run teawater. Trigger is staring down at her hands, tears and snot flowing from her face without any attempt to stop it. Vader points at Pedima. ‘Go get a hand towel. Wet it with some water from the kitchen.’

Pedima shakes herself, and slowly gets up before going and doing as he says. She hands him the towel shortly, and he gives it to Trigger. She mutely starts mopping her face off, staring determinedly at the wall straight across from her and not any of them. They can hear the teapot heating up. Vader points at Kylo. ‘What happened?’

Kylo tries to make sense of her swirling thoughts. She shrugs one-shouldered. ‘They were arguing. Trigger got upset and slapped Saiph, and started screaming. Aimee was trying to break it up. Nobody really got hurt, though.’ She thinks of earlier, when she pinned Aimee to the floor without even noticing what she was doing. That more than this seems like a threat to anyone’s safety, but Vader wasn’t there, then, and nobody had said anything.

Vader turns to look at Saiph. ‘Are you alright?’

Saiph gives a thumbs up, still with that quietly angry, cynical look about them, but on top of that they just look tired. Vader turns back to Trigger. ‘What about you?’ Trigger flinches, a brief war crossing her expression as she cringes away, settling on something pained looking. She doesn’t answer. Kylo is remembering what she said, what she could make out of it at least--  _ “so they can come and get me and send me back to him and let me fucking suffer and die...” _ Kylo’s not sure whether she means Luke or not. She doesn’t really know anything about these people or where they come from, besides what she’s learned today. She kept to herself back at the temple.

‘I don’t think you’re helping,’ she says quietly. Everyone looks at her. She glances up at Vader, at his unreadable mask. When he doesn’t respond she takes a shaky breath. ‘Please go back to the cockpit.’

‘As you say,’ he says, miraculously, and turns and leaves.

Everyone continues to look at her. She looks at Trigger. ‘Any better?’

Trigger nods slightly. She’s trembling, not looking at any of them again. ‘Thank you,’ she says, voice impossibly small.

Kylo nods. ‘Sure.’ She feels in control, all of a sudden. The world has lost its foggy quality. She feels realer. She looks around, taking inventory. Saiph and Gabriela both haven’t moved. Aimee is watching quietly from the kitchen, still crying. Pedima is standing around awkwardly. The teapot starts whistling. ‘Aimee, take that off and come and sit down. Pedima, can you put away the fish and then pour us some tea?’ Her voice isn’t authoritative like Vader’s was, just calm. Confident in her directions.

‘Okay,’ Pedima says, and Aimee trots back over gratefully. It’s good Vader calmed things down, Kylo thinks, but he doesn’t know what he’s doing here. It’s an ironic thought to have shortly after realising she doesn’t know these people at all, but she’s not the one who’s been shut up in the cockpit all day. Pedima takes the fish over to the kitchen. Kylo notices her half finished dinner. She’s not really hungry anymore. ‘Anyone want this?’

When nobody responds Pedima says, ‘I’ll put it away.’

‘Thanks.’ She lets her take the dish. ‘Gabriela, can you go check on Korrum?’

Gabriela shakes himself. ‘Hmmn?’

‘Can you go check on Korrum.’

‘Do you mean...’

‘Oh, right, yeah, he told me he’s changing his name. Can you go check on him please?’

‘Sure.’ He gets up and disappears into the bunk room. Kylo turns her attention to Trigger and Saiph. She’s not going to try to make them reconcile; it seems like a dick move, the sort of thing Luke or her mom would do. They both seem self contained at the moment, Trigger looking marginally more relaxed at the table, Saiph still sitting on the back of the sofa, each looking at their own hands. Probably fine there. She looks at Aimee instead, who is still leaking slightly.

‘You okay, Aimee?’

Aimee nods, worrying her lower lip. ‘Yes. Thank you, Kylo.’

Kylo nods. ‘Sure.’ Her flock accounted for, she sits quietly.

Pedima finishes putting the fish away and serves them all tea, afterwards standing near the table and worrying her hands. She needs work, Kylo thinks. She likes to keep moving. ‘Can you gather all the clothes Vader brought us and sort them according to size?’

‘Sure thing, boss,’ she says as she starts moving again, and it’s a joke, but Kylo thinks she also just tamed the room.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 


	9. Chapter 9

They go to bed; it’s late by some clock or another. Kylo learns Aimee couldn’t sleep much last night, which at least solved the problem of there only being six bunks as she stayed up and meditated and then took a nap on the couch. ‘You can climb in with me if you get tired,’ Pedima, smallest among them by at least a foot of height, offers. ‘There’s probably enough room.’

‘Okay,’ she says. ‘Thank you.’ Kylo thinks of Vader, trying to diffuse the situation, and how scared Aimee and Trigger both looked. It’s good for them to have their safe little room. They each take turns in the fresher, climbing into their bunks afterwards, except for Aimee who takes a spare pillow to sit on cross-legged in the corner of the room. Kylo asks Pedima to put their shorn braids in one of the boxes Vader brought back his purchases in and put them in the main room, and the room feels a bit lighter without them. Trigger is the first in bed, the covers pulled up to her nose and pretending to be asleep as the rest of them get ready. They all let her. Saiph climbs into a lower bunk and lies with their back to the room. Things feel a little tense still, but not unmanageably so, and Kylo doesn’t realise how tired she is until she lies down. She’s asleep moments later.

She dreams of the temple and wakes up in a cold sweat. The lights are turned off, and in the windowless of space travel the room is pitch black. The sheets are cool under her legs, the blanket somewhat itchy, her skin clammy and crawling. She can feel the force presences of the others, dwarfed by Vader’s, and takes a moment to count them. All six are there. Someone is snoring.

She gets out of bed and hops carefully to the door, mind clouded and sick with the imagery of her dream: the burning temple, the looks on their faces as she told them what Luke had done after gathering them all, the argument, the bodies, the bodies, all dark and lit in orange. Luke’s expression. The blazing green.

The lights are on in the main room, but Vader isn’t there. Probably still shut up in the damn cockpit. Kylo hops over to the bathroom and collapses on the toilet seat. She folds her arms on the edge of the sink and buries her face against them. The plastic of the fixtures is cool and feels good against her sweaty skin, but with her eyes closed she only sees the temple. She picks her head up again and looks around the bathroom instead. It’s black and pale grey like the rest of the ship; utilitarian. There’s no art or anything of the like to look at. Instead she studies the lines of the wall panels, but it’s not enough to distract her.

She gets up and takes a sonic with her clothes on, bracing against the wall and just standing still under the jets of air. She makes them cool, and then cold, using the sharp shock to stabilize herself, to try to bring herself back to the present. It works a little.

She goes back to the main room. There’s more to look at in here. Pedima sorted the clothes in stacks draped over the coffee table. They look handmade, with heavy, occasionally rough stitching, and sewn out of leathers and furs and fabric with larger weaves. Probably cost a fortune, Kylo thinks, feeling the fabric of a pair of pants between her fingers and thinking about all the effort that must have gone into it without automation. But maybe it didn’t, out in the outer rim, on a planet where this is normal. Maybe they’d think the same about her clothes. She’s still wearing the nightclothes she woke up in, back at the temple.

Fuck.

She hops over to the kitchen and starts heating up water for tea. Aimee and Vader both seemed to think it was a good cure, and it’s better than doing nothing. She listens to the water heat, thinking she can see subtle changes in the colour of the metal teapot but probably imagining it. When it starts to whistle she takes it off deftly, not wanting to wake the others, and opens the lid to let it vent and shut it up while she gets the teabags together.

She gets her tea and sits at the table with it, opposite from the way she was sitting before, studying the room from a new angle. The hot tea feels weird in her chest after the freezing sonic. It’s not enough. Just trying not to think about it isn’t enough.

She sighs. She knows what would distract her.

She puts her tea down and hops across the room to the cockpit, and knocks. Vader says, ‘Enter.’ She does.

The cockpit is similar to the rest of the ship, grey and black and impersonal. Vader is sitting in the pilot’s seat, swivelled to face the door. There’s an empty copilot’s seat and Kylo closes the short distance to it, letting the door whoosh shut behind her.

‘Why have you come?’ Vader asks.

She shrugs. ‘Can’t sleep.’ It’s not a lie, just the easiest version of the truth.

He doesn’t respond, and for a moment she thinks he’s not going to until he says, ‘I apologise for earlier. You handled the situation well.’

She cocks her head. ‘You could hear what was going on?’ The thought sends a familiar shot of panic up her veins, but at the same time, it’s an automatic reaction and she’s not really worried about it. They’re trusting Vader with their lives, after all. Thinking that thought circles her back to empathy for what Trigger is going through, but again, she’s barely worried, even though she probably should be. Anybody could kill them. Vader isn’t special.

‘Not everything. But these walls are only so thick.’

She nods. Something to warn the others of, she guesses, even though they’ll probably feel worried about it. They should know even so. ‘Thank you, then. Thanks for, uh, backing off.’

He nods. It feels so much more formal than the little agreements and punctuations of all their little head bobs: a slow, purposeful incline, once before rising again. A bow, almost. ‘As I say. You handled the situation well.’

‘Thanks,’ she says again, wishing she’d brought her tea for something to fiddle with. She’s not looking at Vader. She doesn’t like looking at people when they talk, unless it’s to study some part of their body: their teeth, their knees, their hands or what they’re doing with them. It just feels rude and unnecessary, to try to look at the whole. She knows you’re supposed to make eye contact, but it always captures her attention when she does, and takes too much focus to maintain. She’s not sure how you’re supposed to get anything done like that, unless it’s something you’re intentionally weaponising; another one of those pointless society rules her mother tried to instill.

She thinks about Leia, small and soft and steady and terrifying and terrified. She never looks at her mother’s face, either. She barely knows what she looks like. Instead she knows her as folds of rich fabrics and long brown hair and small shoulders, and someone growing shorter and shorter as Kylo grew older but looming just as large. She can’t predict what Leia’s reaction to this will be, mind slipping off it the second she tries to grab hold. She could never predict what Leia’s reaction to anything would be. Something inside her hurts.

‘Would you like me to leave situations like this for you to resolve?’ Vader is saying.

Kylo pulls herself back to the present. ‘Yeah. Well, I don’t know. You did help diffuse it. You were just being too--’ she gestures vaguely. ‘... Bossy,’ she settles on.

‘Bossy,’ he repeats. He almost sounds amused.

‘Uh-huh. You’re intimidating. If you’re gonna come in like that you need to be nicer.’

He’s quiet for a pause, and she glances at his face briefly, nervous, before remembering there’s no information to be gleaned there. ‘I... will make an attempt,’ he says eventually.

She almost laughs, surprised. Adults never listen to her; she’s given up expecting they will, instead just talking out of her ass because she might as well if nobody’s going to care. But Vader of all people listens. She’s beginning to see more reasons why she feels like this is a good idea, why her instincts might not have lead them wrong. ‘You can’t just stay in the cockpit and only come out when something is going wrong, either,’ she says, riding the confidence high. ‘That makes you so much scarier.’

He nods again. ‘Anything else?’

Wow. ‘Do you like, even interact with other people, ever?’

‘I have had few visitors in the last thirteen years.’

She’s thirteen. That’s her entire life. ‘Holy fuck.’

‘You understand why I appreciate your advice.’

She nods. ‘Yeah. Uh... yeah. I do.’ She does, but it’s fucking incredible that anyone, least of all Sith lord Darth Vader, thinks she’s fit to give them advice about interacting with other people. It’s fucking  _ wild. _ ‘You should listen to the others, too. They’re all scared of you. Most of them, at least.’ Gabriela doesn’t seem to be. ‘If you were to ask them for help or advice or something that’d probably help fix that.’ It’s fixing it with her; even if she wasn’t all that scared, she certainly isn’t about to be now.

‘I will. Thank you.’ He pauses. ‘It has been a long time since I have found myself in the business of not being scary.’

She does laugh this time, an odd noise that surprises her. She wonders for the first time what his story is: where he came from, how he got here. It’s probably a downer, though, so she doesn’t want to ask when he’s so politely not asked her about her own. That reminds her, she wanted to ask him how he knew they had killed the other students. But she doesn't want to think about that right now.

It still sobers her up as she shoves the thought from her mind. She glances at his mask again, not sure of what she's looking for this time, and away.

'Is something wrong?' he asks.

She shakes herself. 'Just-- bad dreams. That's why I couldn't sleep.'

'Do you read?'

'Sometimes.' She can, it's just not her favourite. She prefers audiobooks.

He turns his chair and opens a drawer underneath the dash. It's pretty empty inside, but among the few items is an old reader which he hands to her. She takes it. It's silver and rectangular and largeish, and looks at least several decades old. It's not even a proper datapad; it'll only have the books it was loaded with. The screen is dark, powered down, and a little dusty in the corners. 'To distract yourself,' he says.

'Thanks,' Kylo says, looking down at the old reader with something approaching awe. She glances up at Vader, again realises he's unreadable and looks back down. 'Thank you,' she repeats. She wonders what's on there. Only one way to find out.

'Would you be more comfortable in the living room?' Vader asks while she powers the reader up. It takes a couple moments to boot up, displaying an archaic version version of some tech brand logo in cyan on a lined blue screen as it does.

'Oh, um, probably,' she says distractedly, realises what he asked, thinks about the squashy fake leather armchair, and says, 'Sure.' Besides, she knows a dismissal when she hears one. She guesses he's sick of her. She gets up and hops out of the room, trying to ignore her heart falling. It should be alright. Why in fuck should this make her sad, he's--

He's following her. She looks around at him, surprised. 'You thought I should spend more time out of the cockpit,' he explains.

'Oh. Yeah.' Her heart is doing a strange happy patter, one that she doesn't trust. She shoves it down violently within herself. Don't you go getting excited that he's spending time with you, you stupid bitch. Just because he's desperate for advice doesn't mean he likes you. Getting your hopes up is only going to bite you in the ass.

She sits in the armchair, trying very very hard to clamp down desperately on her feelings while also not succumbing to despair. Jedis don't have fucking feelings.

Well, she's a shit fucking Jedi, isn't she.

She sighs. It still won't do her any good to get too hopeful, or feel to affectionate. It's been a day. It's been a day and she is a stupid fucking loser who needs to be smart enough to know that she isn't wanted and isn't going to be.

She breathes deeply, keeping her feelings under control. One good thing Luke tried to teach her, at least. Hey, that's a point. Luke wanted to fucking kill her. She has no business feeling  _ hopeful. _

She examines the reader. The text is a little hard to read, the same cyan on blue. She navigates to the settings first to see if she can change it, but the only display setting is brightness control. Oh well. She goes to look at the books menu instead. There's a ship's manual, as well as several other texts.

She opens the manual first and skims through. It does seem to be for this ship, the interior schematics match. That makes her wonder: how old is this ship? How old is Vader, for that matter? It's obviously been well cared for, or possibly just never used, and a few decades isn't much for something well made. She looks for a date and finds one, but it doesn't note the year system, and it's definitely pre-Yavin. Hmmn. She lets it go in favour of continuing to read the ship's specifics, occasionally glancing Vaderwards or carefully making sure she doesn't. He's mostly just sitting still, anyway, staring at nothing. It makes her feel anxious. That's good.

She figures out the ship is from the previous Republic eventually, by comparing design and notation styles to what she's seen of other historical ship schematics, so at least forty years old, and either pre-war or a civilian vessel though she's betting on the former. She leans into her anxiety regarding Vader at the same time as wondering where he got this ship from, if it's his, who owned it before. She likes history. She likes questions that have answers.

Her ankle aches, and she has an idea.

As soon as her heart dips back into complacency she presses that foot against the floor, putting as much weight on it as she can without appearing to move and alerting Vader. Sharp pain stabs at her ankle, but she keeps any natural reactions under wraps. That should work. She'll condition herself if she has to.


	10. Chapter 10

Kylo is sleepy the next morning, having stayed up way too late reading. She had crawled into bed eventually, but was woken a few hours later by the others getting up as a pack, and now sits at the dining table nursing a cup of tea, her eyes itchy and tired. The books turned out to be fascinating: in addition to the ship’s manual there was a philosophical text by some long-dead Jedi that seemed pretty dreary to take seriously but opened  _ so _ many avenues of curiosity to her, both about their host and the historical context of the text itself, and she had spent several hours pouring over it until sleepiness got the better of her and she unceremoniously left Vader sitting in the living room to climb back in her bunk.

And Vader-- well, curiosity was fine, she just has to be careful not to let it feel too much like interest, because that can careen into like which can careen into trust. She leans on her ankle again.

The others are mostly quiet, the atmosphere subdued though not nearly as tense as last night. Aimee and Pedima are making breakfast. Trigger is taking a very long time in the fresher. Korrum is sitting close to Gabriela on the sofa, his legs tucked up to his chest. Saiph is staring at the ceiling. Vader is ensconced in the cockpit again.

Kylo blows some hair out of her face, leaning on her hand, and calls the reader over to her where she left it on a stack of clothes on the coffee table. Korrum and Gabriela watch it fly across the room like bored cats.

The bathroom door whooshes open, revealing Trigger, who tries for a normal walk that quickly turns into an awkward slink before catching itself again, creating a weird almost limp as they walk over to where Saiph is installed on the armchair. Saiph looks up.

‘I’m sorry,’ Trigger says. ‘I shouldn’t have slapped you.’

Saiph considers her for a moment, and then types, ‘Apology accepted. I shouldn’t have goaded you.’

Trigger shrugs. ‘It’s fine. I was being a bitch anyway.’

‘Friends again?’

She nods, scraping her lower lip with her teeth. ‘Yeah. I’d like that.’

Saiph nods too. Trigger tries for a smile, which looks a little more like a symptom of mental breakdown than anything else, but Saiph returns it in its intended form.

‘There’s tea~’ Aimee says from the kitchen, looking over at Trigger. ‘Come get some.’

Trigger walks over, a bit more normally now. ‘I’m sorry I screamed at you, Aimee.’

‘It’s okay! You were clearly very overwhelmed. I’m glad you seem to be feeling better now.’

‘I am,’ small. She rubs the back of her neck.

‘Good!’ Aimee hands her a mug of tea.

‘Thanks,’ she mumbles, and goes and sits down next to Korrum on the sofa, shaking her hair out of her face.

Silence again. Aimee and Pedima serve breakfast, and they all get some and thank them and return to their spots, and the quiet descends again. It’s not uncomfortable quiet. They’re just all processing their own worlds. Kylo has the reader open to the spot where she left off but her brain can’t seem to grasp any of the words, so she settles for staring blankly at the tabletop.

The cockpit door opens. They all look. ‘We are going to Kal’Shebbol,’ Vader announces as he enters the room. ‘It will be a few days’ journey. We can change trajectory to somewhere nearer if we run out of supplies.’

Aimee: ‘Okay, I think there should be enough for a few days’ worth of meals.’

He came out to talk to them. Kylo leans on her ankle. Vader walks over and sits down at the table. Nobody speaks.

'Is... there something else going on, sir?' Gabriela asks.

'It has come to my attention that spending time in your presence would help alleviate some of your fears.'

Kylo doesn't facepalm, instead settling for biting her lower lip to press down on a smile, and then presses on her ankle harder. Vader looks at her. Fuck. She stops.

'I should examine and redress your ankle at some point in the next couple days, Kylo, whenever you are willing.'

'Uh. Sure.' Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck. Is he an empath? How is an empath worse than her at talking to people? The silence that follows is awkward, but Kylo is busy quietly freaking out.

'What's your favourite colour?' Aimee asks.

Vader looks at her. She sips her tea blithely.

'I have never considered it,' he says eventually.

'Mine's velvet blue.'

'Mine's red,' Pedima offers.

Aimee: 'What shade of red?'

'Like bright alarm red.'

Aimee turns back to Vader. 'If you had to wear only one colour forever, what would it be?'

Vader looks down at himself. He looks back up at her.

Kylo can't help it. She bursts out giggling.

Aimee laughs too, and she's not the only one. 'Okay, dumb question. How about, do you ever want a change of pace from all the black?'

'I've never thought about that, either.'

Kylo has her hand over her mouth, trying to pack her laughter, her joy back in and tamp it down. It feels so good, after everything, just to laugh-- but she can't let herself trust this, or there'll just be more bad things to come. She can't lean on her ankle so soon right now so she settles for good old fashioned shoving emotions as far down inside herself as possible and thinking about something scary.

Snoke's gone. That's scary.

Where'd he go? Why isn't he here for her? Is Vader hiding them well enough that Snoke can't find them either? That would make sense, come to think of it. She doesn't know how to address it from there, though. She can't ask Vader to make an exception: it might open them up for attack from Luke, and she's never told anyone about Snoke before. She doesn't know how he'd take it. Probably badly. People aren't supposed to have friends living in their heads. And her friends are beginning to feel safe here, so-- so she'll just have to ride it out. Reconsider later. She's uncertain without him -- he could probably talk her out of this dangerous hope -- but they'll both be okay. She made this decision for some reason or another, even if in her panic she wasn't quite sure what that reason was. Maybe she just wasn't ready to tell them all. Maybe she was afraid they'd turn on her then, too.

Mood sufficiently ruined, she watches all of them quietly. They're still talking about colours. It's good that Aimee and Pedima seem somewhat warmed up to Vader, at least. She wants her flock to feel okay. Of course, that means she'll just have to be extra vigilant on their behalves. Vader distracted, she leans quietly on her ankle.


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> //panic attack descrip

A couple days pass without much change. Trigger is silently though warily acceptant of Vader's presence in a given room, and the others seem to have more or less accepted him as an awkward piece of furniture. Aimee's even friendly, still. Kylo avoids speaking with Vader when she doesn't have to, not trusting herself. She does, however, have to acquiesce to letting him look at her ankle, because she can't think of a decent excuse why not.

'It is not healing properly,' he says, a simple med scanner in one large black-gloved hand displaying numbers she can read from her angle but can't make sense of. The ankle itself is puffy and discoloured with the bandages removed, and she avoids looking at it, shame trickling down her back. 'Something is exacerbating the break. Likely you are failing to keep weight off it.'

'I'm trying,' she lies, mumbling. 'It's hard not being able to walk around.'

'I will acquire you a set of crutches.'

'Okay.' She's going to need a new plan or he's going to start getting suspicious. She's worried he already is suspicious. Her mind instantly goes to her lightsaber, but that's very noticeable and a bit more heavy hitting than what she needs. She remembers the razor Trigger pulled from her sock, and wonders where it ended up. It suddenly occurs to her to wonder also why Trigger has such a thing in such a place. Maybe she should try for a kitchen knife instead. Maybe she can use her lightsaber to rough up the end of a fork or butterknife and make it jaggedy. They don't have a lot by way of dishes, though... hmmn.

She lies awake that night looking at the underbelly of the bunk above her, weighing her options. A utensil missing is probably less suspicious than a razor, she decides. They don't use all of the butterknives all of the time. She sits up in bed and takes inventory of the others. Aimee is asleep tonight, cuddling with Pedima. The others are all asleep as well.

She gets up, worrying about walking quietly more than about avoiding putting weight on her bad ankle. Pain screams at her, more so than usual when just leaning on it sitting down, and she almost barfs. The pain has been keeping her nerves ragged over the past couple days, and she's been learning her lesson, but if she's honest with herself switching tactics for a bit will be a relief. Not that she deserves relief. Not that it's a good thing that she knows how to handle cutting better than she does this new pain. It's just a necessity either way.

She gets her lightsaber and goes to the kitchen and gets a butterknife, then locks herself in the bathroom. She powers her saber on. The whoosh and hum are much, much louder and she would like. Panic strikes her, trying to think of a decent lie but unable to. Her blade flickers and dies. She hears footsteps, not Vader's, too fast and light. Multiple sets of footsteps. Shit. She looks around, panicked but seeing nothing that could help. She hears other lightsabers blaze to life, several of them. 'Kylo?' someone asks, voice scared. Gabriela. Fuck. She doesn't know what to do. She's holding the fucking evidence and she doesn't know what to do with it. She doesn't have a good story. She's trapped. Her vision is swimming.

Outside, making the situation infinitely worse, Vader's footsteps and voice: 'What's going on?' A high pitched terrified shriek. More footsteps, more voices. Voices raising. Oh fuck, fuck, fuck, there's going to be another fight, her friends are going to need her but she can't  _ move-- _

Someone knocks on the door. 'Kylo, are you in there?' It's Aimee. Kylo can't speak, or breathe. She ruined everything. Everything's ruined. 'Kylo, please open the door...'

Her friends need her. Her resolve hardens. She can see the door controls, they're almost within arm's reach. She just needs to...

She balances on her off foot on the wrong angle, cries out in pain, and overbalances off the toilet seat landing in a heap on the floor. She starts sobbing. That's it, she's done for. She's going to die here and she couldn't even help her friends. She's going to die here in a heap and her parents will never know what happened to her, Snoke will never know what happened to her, they're just going to vanish into the darkness except they're murderers so everyone will have the wrong reason not to be fine with that. Her ankle hurts so, so much.

The door controls click and the door whooshes open. She flinches in on herself, face buried against the floor, waiting for the click-whoosh of a lightsaber next, waiting for it all to be over. She doesn't know what look Luke had in his eyes as he stood over her. She only knows his shape, and the awful green glow. She waits to burn, seeing searing green even now.

She doesn't. Instead she feels strong, cold arms like metal heft her up from the ground and carry her. The room swims as she's carried, vision unfocused. There seems to be a blob of black on one side of her. She's deposited gently on the sofa, and then there's something warm and person-like beside her, not touching her, just radiating heat. As she blinks she recognises Aimee's round knees, fatter than the others' in the same brown sleep pants.

Another wave of panic sweeps through her as she realises she's not holding her lightsaber anymore. Where did it go, she needs her lightsaber, needs it between her and--

She vomits, doubling over, mostly hitting her own bare feet. 'Oh, honey,' Aimee says, and she can feel her warm hands hesitating to touch her. She quivers, feeling sick, but landing back in reality senses first: the sharp, acrid smell, the layer of fabric between the fake leather sofa and her sweaty thighs, the sense of more people close by. The last part makes her scared and she looks around, not seeing enough to take anybody in, even Aimee who she already knows is next to her. Does Aimee still have her lightsaber? She's going to need it, with all these people around.

Oh. Those are probably her friends.

Her vision slowly, softly, starts to refocus. Pedima is across from her holding a damp towel. Their eyes briefly find one another's. 'Hey,' Pedima says. 'I, uh, was gonna clean you up but I wanted to make sure you weren't gonna murder me first.'

It's a joke, or a colloquialism, but it hits Kylo harshly. Pedima flinches too, seeming to realise. 'I don't actually think you will,' she amends. 'I just thought you might kick me or something. Um, can I--' she makes a small movement with the towel.

Kylo breathes in. It takes her some doing but she nods. Pedima cleans up the vomit. Kylo doesn't kick her. Settling down from panic Kylo now mostly feels guilty, ashamed, not entirely sure what happened here but pretty sure it's all her fault and she should slink away and die about it. It still smells like vomit in here, but less so. Pedima leaves Kylo’s immediate vicinity and she loses track of her.

She looks around, trying to take inventory, trying to make sure everybody’s alright. Aimee is next to her. Pedima was fine a second ago. There’s a black shadow in her peripheral vision she assumes is Vader, but he’s the one she’s not worried about. Saiph is there, standing, unharmed. Gabriela and Trigger are standing together, the former with an arm half around the latter, protective. He has his lightsaber. That’s good. She can’t see Korrum, though. Maybe he’s behind her, but she can’t crane her neck all the way around. Fuck, where is he? Is he hiding again? She can’t protect him if she doesn’t know where he is.

Who is she kidding. She can’t protect anybody. She starts crying again.

‘Somebody get her some water,’ Aimee says, and after a few moments a cup appears miraculously and is being offered to her in a pink and red hand. She takes it.

‘I’m sorry,’ Kylo manages to spit out, because she’s sure she should be, for something.

‘Drink your water,’ Aimee says, while in the background Pedima asks quietly, ‘For what..?’

Kylo drinks, and swallows though the acid burns her throat. Drinks more. Feels better for it. The silence ticks on. She remembers she needs to locate Korrum and looks around. Oh, he’s standing in the kitchen. That’s okay then. She settles down and breathes. More silence.

‘What happened?’ Vader asks. 

Kylo looks up, eyes big, the scene flooding back to her, still not clear on the particulars of why things happened, but remembering what did. She can’t tell him. It’s stupid, it’s shameful. She can’t tell any of them.

‘But you can tell him later, right?’ Aimee is saying.

‘Yes,’ Vader says after a moment’s pause.

‘There, it’s okay. Now we just know that he wants to know.’ Her voice is so earnest. Kylo tries to breathe. She has time. Time is good. She can think of an excuse.

‘What, um, happened with you guys?’ she asks.

‘Heard screaming,’ Pedima says. ‘So we all rushed to the main room. I thought something bad was happening.’

‘That was me,’ Trigger says, voice small. She looks as fucked up as Kylo feels, standing close to Gabriela, face red with tears. ‘I, um. I got spooked. I’m sorry.’

Gabriela: ‘We, Trigger and I, heard a lightsaber ignite and woke up, so we went to the main room to investigate. Then Vader came out and we were already feeling jumpy.’

Vader: ‘I heard both of your lightsabers, and thought there might be trouble.’

Gabriela: ‘I assume the first one was you, Kylo? The second was me.’

Kylo still doesn’t want to answer. Aimee saves her: ‘The scream woke the rest of us up I think. We all ran out into the main room. Trigger was freaking out about where you were, and Mr Vader said you were in the bathroom... You wouldn’t open the door so he went and got you.’

Right. She can work with that, probably. ‘I’m sorry. I was freaking out about Luke.’ It’s not entirely a lie. She has no clue what she’s going to say if anyone asks about the butterknife.

‘It’s okay,’ Aimee says. ‘It’s all okay, we were just kind of all freaking out.’

‘Gabriela faced Vader down with a lightsaber,’ Pedima says. Her fur is all ruffled, standing on end even as her voice is mostly calm. ‘It was really cool.’

‘I was freaking out too,’ Gabriela admits. ‘I didn’t really know what I was doing. I was just trying to protect Trigger, I didn’t even think about from what.’

‘You were really brave,’ Trigger whispers. Gabriela hugs her.

Kylo breathes a little easier. They bought it. She doesn’t have to go into more detail. And it’s not like she wasn’t, in fact, freaking out about Luke, though she’s trying not to think about that part less the flashing green creep up on her again.

Well, fuck. She tries to breathe.

'So what were you even doing, Kylo?' Pedima asks.

Fuck. Her mind gropes around blindly for some lie or another, failing to find one, failing to find anything. She can't breathe. The halves of the room are crashing together in her vision. People say things, and she's not sure what. Say something, just, say anything. Make it stop again. 'It's broken.'

People are looking at her.

'M-- my lightsaber,' she clarifies.

'Korrum's isn't working either,' Pedima says, and Korrum glances at her, wincing. 'Oops.'

Korrum sighs. 'I mean, it isn't.'

Vader: 'May I examine your lightsaber?'

It takes her a moment to look around and realise he's looking at her. 'Oh, um. Sure. It's in there.' She nods at the bathroom. Shit, hopefully he won't notice the knife, or won't think anything of it. She was using it as a screwdriver to fix it! There, that's a lie. Vader crosses the room and comes back shortly with her lightsaber. He ignites it. It doesn't last half a second, blade weak and white.

'It is bleeding, as I expected,' he says.

She's momentarily distracted. 'What?'

'Kyber crystals bleed when the dark side of the force is strongly imposed upon them. Bleeding is what gives Sith lightsabers their hue. This crystal has not been fully bled, or it would be a functioning dark blade. It was likely bled accidently as you fought for your life.'

She blinks at him, slowly processing. So her lightsaber, which saved her life from Luke, is casualty to this as well. She feels quietly numb. Vader crosses the room and hands her her lightsaber. She takes it.

'If any of you whose blades have ceased working wish to bleed them fully so they may be used again I can assist you. Do not attempt this on your own, as failure to handle kyber crystals properly can have explosive results.'

'Did you bleed yours?' Pedima asks.

'Yes,' Vader says, and leaves it at that.

Does Kylo want to bleed hers? She can't think. She just holds it, feeling vacant.

'Do we all want to go back to bed?' Aimee asks. 'Or are we up now?'

Kylo, who got no sleep, at least has an answer to that, but she doesn't need the others to follow her. 'I wanna sleep,' Korrum mumbles.

'Yeah, we got barely any,' Pedima agrees, so they all wind up piling back in the bunk room. Kylo spares a look back at Vader as she goes. She still hasn't solved this problem. But there's always kitchen knives.

But she's tired, tonight. She's asleep as soon as her head hits the pillow.


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> mind the self harm warning yall. +suicide threat & another panic attack

Kylo tries again the next night, waiting for everyone’s breathing to even out and then sneaking to the kitchen to grab a sharper knife this time, thinking she’ll just replace it when she’s done. She hops over as quietly as she can, grabs the most accessible of the kitchen knives from the drawer, and locks herself in the bathroom.

She’s kept tally throughout the day of the times she was suppose to punish herself, fourteen in total. Higher than it should be, but this should help. This should help. She sits on the closed toilet seat with her pants around her ankles. This isn’t something she’s new to; she knows her thighs are most likely to never be observed.

She carves fourteen tallies into her right thigh, breathing carefully to prevent from making any noise. It’s a different pain from her ankle, the thin plastic blade leaving a sharp sting. She finishes her handiwork and sets the knife down to admire it. That is a downside to this sort of punishment, that she actually enjoys how pretty it makes her. Red blossoms along the cut lines even as they hurt, and streak thin trails as gravity pulls droplets down her thigh to pool against the black plastic toilet seat. She shouldn’t be enjoying this, but she does. She has to wait for the bleeding to stop on its own, anyway, if she wants to leave no trace. She closes her eyes, breathes deeply, and waits.

This is the real punishment, she reflects. Having to sit here with nothing to focus on but the pain. She was never any good at meditation, easily bored, easily distracted, and furthermore never really grasping the point. It’s so hard for her to keep her mind blank when she wants to, especially with nothing to distract herself. And yet when she wants thoughts she can never find any. Yet another thing that makes her a bad Jedi.

Her thoughts turn again to Luke, and she suppresses a shudder. She doesn’t want to think about him. About what he tried to do to her. She can’t stop herself thinking about it anyway, about the blinding green light. She’s shivering.

She had nothing she can do except wait it out. This is your punishment, she thinks. This is what happens when you don't learn your fucking lesson about trusting people.

She swims in the memories, letting her psyche take her where it will. Luke, her parents, Chewie. R2 and 3PO. Herself as a kid. Lights and noises and confusion and mistrust. Teachers with sickly sweet voices. Her dad's hands. Her mom's hair. The way the air on the Falcon smells. Luke so embedded in the light he hurt to look at. And her, all awkward limbs and dark freckles and bad teeth, always so certain everything was going to go wrong. And it did, didn't it. It did.

She thinks about that night, about the green lightsaber, and the pale fabric covering Luke's midsection, and the darkness of the night pouring in as she brought the cabin down. How harsh her voice had sounded over the intercom, how warm, almost orange, the light was in the room she'd gathered them all in. And the fight. She has been the first to light her saber, she thinks. She isn't sure. She can't remember. She just knew she was going to have to defend herself. But maybe she started all of it. Maybe she had been wrong to warn the others. The others would be safe in their beds at the temple. Their classmates would still be alive. She'd be the only one whose actions would come under question; the only one who would be on the run.

Maybe Luke was right about her.

But it wouldn't have been safe, she reasons, because she's still not sure if Luke survived having a building brought down on his head, and if he is alive there's no telling who he'd go after next. Which of her friends would be the next victim. Trigger with her sharp tongue. Korrum with his broken lightsaber. Pedima with her shamelessness. Saiph with their brutal practicality. Gabriela willing to raise his blade before even remembering who's at the other end. Aimee responding to all the terrible deeds that have transpired by offering tea.

She's crying. She wipes her eyes, trying to stifle any noise, not wanting to wake the others and cause another scene. It wouldn't have been a good thing, she decides. She's glad, if not for anything else about this whole sorry situation, that she has her friends.

She cries quietly for a time, before checking on her cuts and finding them mostly coagulated over gets a towel to wipe off them and the knife and the toilet seat, then washes it thoroughly in the sink. She gives the room and herself another once over to make sure she's left no trace, then heads back to the kitchen to replace the knife.

Trigger is in the living room, nursing a cup of hot water. She looks up at Kylo. Kylo freezes. Shit. She's holding a knife. She looks at it. Trigger looks at it.

'What are you doing,' Trigger asks, eyes not leaving the knife.

Shit, shit, fuck, she doesn't have a lie prepared. 'Uh. Y'know.'

'Oh.' Trigger looks back down at their mug, breathing in the steam, and takes a sip. Through Kylo's panic she notices her face is red and blotchy, before her eyes slide habitually away and she returns with a jolt to the moment at hand, that moment being  _ fuck. _ Was that not vague and deflective enough? What is Trigger thinking? What is Trigger going to do? What's going to happen here?

'You know, you can borrow my razor if you want,' Trigger says, casual as you please, and Kylo's relief is instantly steamrollered by bewilderment. 'What, why the fuck did you think I had it?'

'I didn't...' Kylo manages, trying to rein in some semblance of a thought from where they've all scattered like so much debris. This is what they must mean by mind blowing, she thinks dully, then remembers to finish her sentence. 'I didn't really know what to think.'

'I see you're more of an opportunist, anyway.' It's said with a certain delicacy.

'Uh. Yeah.' Spare ship parts had been her weapon of choice at home, so easy to squirrel away something small and sharp and have her dad never realise where it ended up. But really, opportunist is accurate, she'll use whatever hard object she can find: pain isn't hard to come by, especially at the temple, where there were multiples of every supply and plenty of teens around to lose things. Tweezers, sewing needles, screwdrivers, scissors. A decent sized rock. Pain is one of the few things they've never been able to take away from her, not that she ever intended to give them the chance to try. She remembers what Trigger just offered her. 'Wait, really?'

'Well I mostly said it to break the ice, but yes, really. You can go ahead and take it from my socks and I promise not to murder you.'

'Oh.' This slowly sinks in. 'Thanks.'

'Sure.' Kylo's not sure if it's casual or bitter. She hobbles over to the kitchen to rinse the knife and then put it away. The teapot is still warm on the stove. Kylo pours herself some hot water and hops over to sit in the armchair.

'What are you doing up, anyway?' Kylo asks, and then winces. She was trying to be friendly, not interrogative. She glances at Trigger to look for a reaction, but Trigger is contemplating her mug.

'Can't sleep,' she says after a few moments, and takes a sip.

Kylo nods, her mind circling the evening like a vulture. It occurs to her to think about Trigger herself: Trigger, spidery hands nimble on the razor as they are on everything, and with it tucked in her sock ready at a moment's notice. How long has she been doing this? How long has she been hiding it from Luke? The shiver of another similarity she never knew about runs through her. They could have been friends, maybe, bonded over their misery. She wonders again what Trigger is running from, what she's syphoning off with the pain. For Kylo it had almost always been anguish, though occasionally boredom. She thinks about Trigger's mistrust; of her scream the other night. Trigger knows that they can't rely on anybody but the seven of them.

But she can trust Trigger. She can trust any of them. They've already seen her dark underbelly and came out the other side defending her. But Trigger seems the most likely to understand. 'I'm trying,' she says without preamble, and wets her lips. 'To condition myself.'

Trigger looks at her. 'To do what?'

'Not to trust Vader.'

The silence of understanding fills the space between them. Kylo plows forward: 'It's too easy, to slip into liking him. He's being so kind. I just know it would be dumb, to let my guard down. I didn't trust Luke per say, but I didn't think he would actually...'

Hurt her, yes. Outcast her. Torture her even, with things he thought were for her own good. But as she says it she realises the truth of it: murder never came up seriously in her paranoid daydreams. She had been eternally jumpy about what he or her parents or any adult would do to her if she put one toe too many over the line, ever since she was a little kid. As far back as she could remember, her relationship with her family was one of fear. But it was an uncertain, nebulous fear, sure bad things would happen but unable to conceive of their nature.

Well. Now she knows. Snoke was right to assure her her fears weren't unfounded.

... Where the  _ fuck _ was Snoke anyway?

'How's it working out?' Trigger asks.

Kylo reminds herself off the subject at hand. 'Not great. I was just leaning on my ankle before, but he started to notice, so I had to switch it up.'

'Was that what you were doing last night?'

'Yeah.'

'You thought he wouldn't notice a lightsaber wound?' She sounds incredulous.

'I was trying to melt a butterknife to make it sharper.'

'Oh.'

'I didn't realise the walls were so thin.' Something Vader said floats back to her, about the thinness of the walls. Shit. Can he hear this conversation they're having now? He'll know, he'll know she's onto him, and doing all she can to stop herself falling for his warmth such as it is. Her breathing picks up. Trigger is saying something else, she's not sure what-- but she does recognise her name.

'Kylo?'

She tries to drag herself back to the present, though she isn't sure what her end goal is here. The room changes from distant and blurry to heady and intense.

'Kylo, are you okay? Fuck--'

She can't really see Trigger, the room beginning to blur again.

'Look just come back to the bathroom.' She hears a cup being set down. 'Come on, stand up. You can do it.'

She doesn't think she can control her body now. She pushes. Miraculously she makes it to her feet, feeling entirely removed from the action.

'Good job. Follow me, follow my voice.'

She takes a few clumsy steps after Trigger, but her ankle gives out under her weight and she trips and falls over the coffee table, her knee sharp with pain as it bangs into the edge. She cries out involuntarily. There's two whooshes of doors opening. Oh no, she thinks, unable to think anything else. Oh no, oh no, oh no--

'Kylo!' says Aimee's voice. 'Oh no, are you okay?'

'Keep your voice down, the others need sleep,' Trigger hisses.

'Sorry,' Aimee stage whispers, 'Is everything alright?'

Strong, cold arms lift her firmly up and set her on the couch. She looks up at Vader, unable to see him as anything except a black mass, and ice flooding her veins. 'I will see to her,' Vader says. 'Go back to bed.'

She hears a few answering footsteps, but they stop without a door opening.

'I wish to speak to Kylo alone,' Vader says, voice more commanding now.

There's a strangled noise from off to the side. Kylo looks. Trigger is rooted to the spot, quaking like a leaf. Kylo can't focus on her face enough to know what it's doing, but she doesn't have to to read the raw fear, and defiance.

Not like this, she finds herself thinking. Not Trigger. If I'm going to be casualty let it only be me. Panic wracks her again at the thought.

'What do you want to talk to her about?' Aimee asks, also sounding scared, though her voice is strong.

'It is a private matter.'

Her friends are defending her.

_ Her friends are defending her. _

Hope and warmth as she's never known it spread through her, and it's enough to pull her back to reality. If they can stand up to Vader, so can she. 'Can't you see you're terrifying them?'

Vader turns to look at her. 'If I wished harm upon any of you, I would have made it come to pass by now.' He almost sounds tired.

_ 'Fuck you,'  _ she spits, staring him straight in the blank viewports. It doesn't have the same effect as eye contact, but she wants to hurt, she wants to maim, she wants to bring him to heel. 'How fucking long did Luke bide his time? How many fucking times did he tell me he loves me? There's only one thing I know about, old man, and it's that you can't know what anyone's thinking. You can't know when they'll turn on you. Whether they'll change their minds or if this was their plan from the beginning.' Her voice is foreign to her own ears, harsh, low, and growling. She's never spoken the truth like this before. 'You're rescuing us, sure. For how  _ fucking long?' _

Vader actually flinches. Good, she thinks, feeling power and bloodlust heady in her veins, wanting him to fall to his knees before her, wanting every adult she's ever spoken to in her life to grovel at her feet and beg for mercy, and for her not to give it. Not for what they've done to her.

A thought occurs to her. Vader is rescuing them. Vader sees them as a method of atonement. Her eyes light up with this newfound leverage. 'You're going to do what I say,' she says, 'Or I'm going to run myself through with a lightsaber.'

Aimee gasps, but Kylo ignores it. 'Kneel,' she says.

Vader drops to his knees before her.

Every part of her surges with the thrill of power. She's the one in control here, for once, for once. 'You're going to stop scaring my friends. Everything you do, you're going to think about how it affects them. You're not going to command them around. In fact, you do what they say.'

'Kylo,' Vader says, low, and pleading.

'I didn't say you could talk!' Kylo roars, and there's some very fast footsteps from somewhere to her left. She looks to see Trigger disappear into the bathroom.

'I believe you're the one scaring them now,' Vader says quietly.

Everything drains out of Kylo. The power, the triumph, her nerve. Her shoulders slump. It takes her a moment to realise she's crying.

'Please,' Vader says. 'We can talk about this.'

She shakes her head mutely, eyes clouding with tears, sure she's now ruined everything forever, that the only thing left for her is death. Why is Vader keeping her alive, keeping all of them alive. If he thinks Luke's so great, why doesn't he just go ahead and finish what he started. She deserves it.

She bawls.


	13. Chapter 13

Vader had known when his granddaughter was born.

He had felt her in the force, bright and singing like a new star in the sky, not a year after the Empire had fallen. He knew she was Leia’s, and not Luke’s, from one of the few times he would tap into the news of the outside world. He had seen a picture in hologram blue, of Leia and Solo and a baby whose name, the article reported, the parents were choosing not to disclose. They had been smiling, Leia tired and watching the camera warily, Solo beaming like he had been handed the universe. The baby looked large, especially in Leia’s arms, and had dark hair, face crinkled up and fussy. Healthy son born to Senator Leia Organa and General Han Solo...

He didn’t know anything else about her. He didn’t dare approach, sure her parents would warn her of him, not ready to risk ruining another relationship before it even began. He longed to know her, but he didn’t even reach out to her in the force, sure Leia would take notice. Instead he waited. He didn’t try to track her through the tabloids; it would almost hurt more to only know her from afar, and he hoped even if he doubted that she was growing up clear of the press. But he knew someday she would be old enough for him to approach her and only her. Once she hit her late teens he would once again set feelers out to figure out if and when she had left home. Then he would arrange a meeting, and maybe, just maybe, have a family again. It was this that gave him something to live for, seeing as he really didn’t have anything else left.

And then she had come to him. And she was nothing like he had imagined.

He had given it considerable thought, daydreaming years away on Mustafar, imagining person after person who she might grow to be. Between Leia and Solo she would certainly have the family temper, as well as the family determination. He usually imagined her as large, thinking of the baby in the holo, and that part at least turned out to be correct. Her gender he left vague; her exact height and build switched up every time. Perhaps she was a politician like her mother; perhaps she had been trained in using the force. Perhaps she had abandoned family legacies and struck out in academia, in engineering, in business, in art. Perhaps she was too young to have yet settled on a future for herself in this warless galaxy. Perhaps she was steady and measured. Perhaps she was adventurous and quick-tongued.

For all his speculation Vader could not have been less prepared for her to arrive. For the door to spill open revealing the force sensitive intruders he had been preparing to address or fight to be led by  _ her; _ for her to force herself to stand before him on a broken ankle and tell him Luke wanted her dead before passing out at his feet.

He could not have been less prepared for the reality of her: headstrong, yes, a clear leader among her friends, but vacant, and wary, and traumatised. He could not have been less prepared for her to shake her head no when he asked if anyone would be looking for her. He still doesn’t know what happened. Leia never made her peace with him but he knows her to be kind and strong and good. He doesn’t know what happened that she would not look for her own child, or what she did to make said child believe she wouldn’t. He still doesn’t know what the fuck Luke was thinking, or doing, or what even actually happened that night. He doesn’t know what this child could have done to make Luke Skywalker think her worthy of dying. She rings dark and scared in the force, yes, but she’s a  _ child. _ She’s his  _ niece. _

It seems almost more likely that Kylo mistook the situation somehow, that it wasn’t Luke’s intent to harm her. He didn’t get a full description of the events from her the first time he asked, and she’s far too traumatised for him to want to try again so soon, and talking to Luke himself isn’t a risk he’s willing to take. Whatever Luke’s intentions, the assassination attempt was very real to Kylo. He’s not going to discount that. He’s not going to so much as suggest to her that she’s overreacting. What she needs is to feel safe, and part of that is feeling believed.

But damn if it’s not frustrating how little any of them trust him. Understandable, yes, but frustrating. Even though Kylo is his main interest he would have taken in any child that turned up at his door claiming Luke Skywalker tried to kill them, and these six are no exception. It’s only been a few days, yes, and yes, his people skills leave a lot to be desired-- he knows this. He knows they’ve all suffered a great trauma. He knows that the only way they’re going to learn to trust him is with time. But it's difficult, when she's right there in front of him, hurting and reeling and  _ not his. _

Telling her they're related is out of the question. He had thought she already knew, when she was revealed in the doorway that evening. But since she doesn't-- well, that went terrible with Luke, and presumably Leia, though that one was out of his control. He's got to be delicate about this. He's got to wait til she already trusts him, or else he'll wind up all alone again.

So he’s been doing something he hasn’t in a long time, and reigning his emotions in by meditating in the cockpit, the only room in the small shuttle where he can get some privacy with seven teenagers hovering around. 

(That's another reason to think this is all a misunderstanding. He can't afford to get angry. They wouldn't understand it was on their behalves.)

He thought it was due to him being a stranger, and a dark force user, and to them showing up straight from a traumatic experience he could hear systems away through the force. He didn’t think it was this bad. He didn’t think, never would have thought that Kylo would hurt herself just to stop herself trusting him.

_ Conditioning, _ was the word she used, and it was like someone had dumped a bucket of ice down the back of his suit.

He stays on his knees in front of her as she cries. The other four have entered the room, hovering anxiously by the doorway, but they're not his concern right now. Kylo is.

He doesn't know what he's doing wrong. He knows at least some of it is due to what she experienced before coming to him and therefore is out of his control, but he doesn't know what he should be doing better.  _ Be nicer to them, _ she had said.  _ Stop scaring them. _

What about her? What is it he can do for her? He watches her, quiet, afraid of saying the wrong thing. He's helpless, like he's so used to being.

But he's got to say something. He's here for them to rely on. He can't just sit there while she suffers, pain terrible and twisted in the force.

'We can talk about this,' he repeats, and pauses to think when that changes nothing. She's a victim of god knows what, and a kid, and betrayed. What does she need to hear? He thinks back to what she had said:  _ all I know is you can't know what anyone's thinking. _

'You're not in trouble,' he says carefully.

That earns him a pause, a peek through her fingers at him, breath still catching and sniffling, but not wailing anymore. 'It's okay,' he continues. 'I'm... not mad at you.'

She presses her cupped hands over her nose and mouth and shakes her head.

'I'm not,' he says, more firmly, and she flinches. Fuck. 'It will be okay,' he tries, voice still a little too hard, and he winces inwardly. She shakes her head again, drawing in on herself on the sofa, as much as she can with her gangly limbs. He feels a stab of her physical pain in the force as she moves her leg up to her chest. His heart breaks, as much as it can when you don't have one.

He stares at her, trying desperately to figure out what to say, not letting himself sink into despair. Fighting against the fog that tends to cross his mind in social situations, and in situations where he doesn't know what to do, though he repeats himself. 'I'm sorry,' he says.

He doesn't know where it comes from, but it seems somehow like the only thing left to say. And it gets her attention. Those big, brown doe eyes, so much like Padme's, lashes drawn together and thick with tears, focus on him again. They drift and then refocus each second she looks directly at him. She hiccups, lower face still hidden in her cupped hands.

And he is, sorry. Sorry he doesn't know anything better to say or do to fix it. Sorry it came to this point. Sorry for all his mistakes that meant he wasn't in her family from the beginning, wasn't a side she could bury her face in and a wall she could hide behind Luke from, and he would've stood firm between them and found out for himself what the hell had happened.

But that's not how it went. That's not how it started going forty years ago. And he can't go down that hole right now. He focuses on who's in front of him, like Kylo is trying so hard to do.

She can't know what he's thinking. So he has to tell her.

'I know I haven't been doing a good job of helping you. But I want to keep trying.'

She doesn't say anything, just keeps looking at him, so he continues. 'You don't think it's safe to trust me. That is okay. I'm not going to hurt you, but you don't have proof of that. So I'm trying to do what I can.'

One of the other children goes and knocks on the bathroom door. He waves away the detail and keeps talking. 'What I can do is protect you from Luke and from anyone else who would wish you harm, make sure you're fed and sheltered, and avoid losing my temper. I wish bitterly there were more. But your unwillingness to trust me shows that you're smart, and you have a strong fighting spirit. I won't try to break that, as much as I want you to believe I won't let you down.'

He's waited long enough for her. He can wait a bit more. But he can't say that part out loud. 'All I want is to build a safe and secure life for you, and your friends.' And to be part of it, and to be part of it, and to have his family back. 'But as I've already explained to you, my social skills are subpar. If there's something I should do differently, explain it to me.'

Her face scrunches up as though sobbing, but no more tears come out. She wraps her arms around herself, burying herself in a hug, and rocks back and forth gently where she sits.

He waits. He's very good at that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> vader time


	14. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [now available in chinese](https://baiwang955.lofter.com/post/1ffdd226_1c765e7c8) thanks to [machalicai!](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MachaliCai/pseuds/MachaliCai)

She sits shaking in the back corner of the deactivated sonic, knees up to her chest, razor clutched in one hand cutting lightly into her fingers, eyes fixed on the door, heart pounding. She’s barely even registering what happened; not a good sign. But she can’t manage to think about it. She can’t manage to think about anything. She can only stare at the black door, at the closed lock. It won’t do any good if Vader wants to come in. It didn’t the other night. She’s not safe here.

She has nowhere else to go, though, so it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. At least here she can feel like she's hiding. The seconds pass in lurches, her vision tunneling, blinking frequently with the effort of keeping her eyes wide open and focused on the door. She needs to be ready. Ready to do what, she doesn't know. All she has is a razor, and her own two feet.

A song she's listened to over and over, a spooky, raspy-voiced old man urging on the survival of a young woman:  _ if all you've got are your own two legs, just be glad you've got em. _

She's got more than that. She's got a razor and a mouth full of teeth and her skinny arms and bony head and when she goes down she will go down fighting. Or screaming. Or trying to run.

She doesn't know how brave she can trust herself to be, but she does know she won't go quietly. Not here, where all she has are friends, and a single known enemy, and everything else will be lost to the blackness of space. It's not like before.

She clutches the razor tighter.

There's a knock on the door and she jolts and stuffs her fist in her mouth to stop herself from screaming. She takes inventory of the situation in a panic. Escapes: one, out to the main room where there is fighting and there is also someone who wants to get at her. Obstacles: the person between her and the rest of the ship, the fact that there's nowhere to fucking go. Tools: her razor, which won't do much good; the lock, which won't keep Vader out, but will probably work on the others.

Oh. Conclusion: it's one of her friends who's knocking.

She removes her hand from her mouth and takes a shaky breath. Just breathe. Breathe, and then ask: 'Who-- who's there?'

'Gabriela,' says Gabriela's voice.

That's probably okay. She would be able to hear if Vader were outside the door forcing Gabby's hand, because of his breathing. She would have heard if he had issued any more orders. Instead all she hears is calm talking she can't quite make out. 'What do you want?' she asks, with a little better of a grasp on her voice.

'I think you should hear some of this stuff.'

She frowns, now curious. It's-- probably okay, Gabriela isn't the most aware of people, but she does know he means her well, and his lightsaber isn't broken. She gets unsteadily to her feet and unlocks and opens the door.

Gabriela is indeed standing there. She glances nervously around. Vader is talking, still kneeling before Kylo, who is crying on the couch. The others are hanging back nervously by the bunkroom door. 'What is it?' she whispers.

In answer Gabriela jerks his head in the direction of Vader and Kylo. She takes a cautious step into the doorway, looking at the pair. Without the closed door in the way she can hear what Vader's saying clearly. '...But your unwillingness to trust me shows that you're smart, and you have a strong fighting spirit. I won't try to break that, as much as I want you to believe I won't let you down.'

He pauses. 'All I want is to build a safe and secure life for you, and your friends. But as I've already explained to you, my social skills are subpar. If there's something I should do differently, explain it to me.'

He falls silent as Kylo hugs her knees to her chest and starts rocking. She looks at Gabriela. The words weren't super out of the character they've seen so far: comforting, yes, but with little substance to back them up. Gabriela notices her looking. 'I know it's important to you to have all the information,' he says softly.

She nods. That makes sense.

'Earlier, he was apologising,' Gabriela explains.

Okay, that's interesting. He still could be lying, of course, but he doesn't seem like the sort of guy to lay it on thick. He's not a schmoozer or a self-debaser, he just repeats the same messages of comfort in that toneless mechanical voice. She really wishes he didn't wear that helmet all the time, it makes him so much harder to read, makes him all that better at hiding things. But she suspects it's a medical need, especially given his offer to Saiph.

'For what?' she still keeps her voice to a whisper, not wanting to alert Vader to them talking.

Gabriela shrugs. 'I think... a lot of things? I don’t know what happened before I woke up...’

She doesn’t either, despite being there, so she doesn’t try to say anything about it.

‘And some of the other stuff he was saying... how he understands that we don’t have any reason to trust him, but that all he can do is try his best.’ He rolls his shoulders uncomfortably.

She looks at him. He’s looking out at Vader and Kylo. Nobody is talking. She jerks her head back at the fresher with a meaningful look at him.

He follows her back inside, and she locks the door. ‘How are you doing?’ she asks quietly.

‘Oh,’ he says, also keeping his voice down. ‘No, I’m-- I’m alright. I was mostly concerned you would think I was patronising you.’

She blinks. ‘Oh. I mean, as long as you’re not only telling me the good parts?’

‘No, that’s the whole gist of it.’

‘It’s fine, then. Giving me the facts isn’t patronising.’ She glances away as she says it, though, aware of her place in this group: the scaredy-cat, jumping at every shadow. They’re all trying to make her feel better, and it’s caring and not condescension, but it still grates on her nerves that they all think she’s the one in the wrong here. They don’t understand.

Well, Kylo seems to. And Korrum.

Gabriela raises his eyebrows. She sighs. ‘You all think I just don’t have the facts. That’s not it.’

‘No, I know that. You’re probably one of the more survival-positive people here.’ He rubs the back of his neck. ‘It’s just living constantly on edge is hard. If he is going to betray us, he’s pretending to be nice for now, so we can relax as long as he goes along with it.’

She arches an eyebrow. She hadn’t thought about it that way, considering the two states to be accepting or not. ‘And when he does betray us?’

‘Then we kick his fucking ass. You saw me last night. I’m not letting him get to you without a fight.’

She’s quiet, looking at him, struck suddenly by this specific care and protection. Not, not letting him get to us-- not letting him get to you. Nobody’s ever expressed that about her before. Not that she can remember.

Gabriela takes a breath. ‘I think you should let Vader help you finish bleeding your lightsaber.’

She refocuses on him, frowning. Gabriela and Vader had been the only two people in the room as she tried to ignite her blade and it completely refused. ‘You think I should let him mess with my lightsaber?’

He shrugs. ‘I think it’s better to have a weapon than not.’

‘What if he does something to it?’

‘Well. He said mishandling them causes explosions. And, ah, it’s a small ship.’

... Huh. That might be worth considering.

He shrugs again. ‘I just don’t think you’d be any worse off, if he plants a bomb he’s in danger too, and if he sabotages it so it doesn’t work you’d just be back where you started.’

‘You don’t think there’s any other possibilities?’

‘Well... I wouldn’t know. Maybe you could do it without letting him touch it. Just have him instruct you. Then at least he couldn’t plant anything. And you’re good with machines, right?’

She’s surprised at that. She didn’t have any friends back at the temple; she didn’t think anyone else would have paid attention to her offering Luke help fixing whatever broke around the temple. Noticed here and there, sure, but not... remembered. ‘Yeah,’ she says, embarrassed for how softly it comes out. ‘I know a little bit about lightsaber construction. Given that we made our own and all.’

‘We assembled our own. You actually looked into the wiring?’

It’s her turn to shrug. ‘Like you said. I like machines.’ It really is all there is to it. She wasn’t about to pass up the chance to learn about such a fascinating device. She’s not familiar with all the potential specifics, but she knows the basic principle of construction: a power cell feeding into one or more crystals with various modulations added for control and to form the bladelike shape. She would probably be able to identify anything obviously wrong.

She nods slowly. It’s not a foolproof plan, but she’s gaining in confidence, and she’d feel a lot better with a real lethal weapon in her hand instead of only a pathetic little razor. ‘Okay,’ she says, then, ‘I suppose yours doesn’t need help?’ She’d feel better not having to approach Vader alone, but Gabriela’s green blade looked as strong as ever last night.

‘Mine has been fine so far, yes.’

Typical. Oh well. Maybe Kylo... no, it’s alright. She’ll be brave. Kylo has enough on her mind. Korrum’s is broken too, but Korrum similarly seems to have enough on his mind. He’s not really tangible to the rest of them.

Except it seems, Gabriela. He was the one to go and check on him the other day, and hadn’t returned any time soon. And they keep sitting together as well. She frowns, loathe to think of Gabriela as the scaredy whisperer, but it seems accurate. ‘How’s Korrum?’

‘Oh.’ He thinks for a moment. ‘He’s... getting along. He’s having a very hard time with all of this. For different reasons than you it appears.’

She nods. She won’t pry further, that’s Korrum’s business. She glances up at Gabriela, one of the few people here who’s taller than she is. He looks serenely vacant as usual, like his mind is nowhere, but he focuses on her when he notices her looking, and smiles.

She smiles weakly back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the song trigger is thinking about is [wait for me by anaiis mitchell, from hadestown](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apWfRFMt1dw)


	15. Chapter 15

It takes Kylo a long time to move. There are too many people here, all of them looking at her, and loathe though she is to crack in such circumstances she eventually calms down enough to both realise she's being stupid and to have the faculties to move her body again. And then she's paralyzed by embarrassment, and stops rocking and hides her face in her hands.

'Kylo?' Vader tries, gently.

Kylo lowers her hands enough to peek at him. She can't really remember what happened just now other than _talking,_ mind devoid of anything except emotion. And the main emotion is still embarrassment, though she's also feeling shaky, and uncertain, and damnably hopeful.

Why does she feel so goddamn hopeful.

She doesn't have the strength left to fight it. Instead she just sits there, swimming in it, still unsure of what else to do. The hope feels... light. Not light like Luke, not blinding. Just nice. Like springtime. Though thinking about Luke quickly plunges her back into the darkness of her memories. She shivers.

Vader stands up. She watches him, filled with the familiar panic of oh god something is changing an adult is doing something, but all he does is turn to look at her friends standing in the doorway and tip his head in her direction. Then he walks over to the kitchen.

She's not really sure what just happened, but her friends spill over to her. Aimee sits next to her on the sofa, Saiph takes the armchair, Pedima sits on the coffee table, Korrum sits on the floor. 'What...' she says softly, dazed. She can hear someone running the tap in the kitchen.

'It's okay,' Aimee says. Her eyes are damp. She reaches up under her glasses to wipe at them with one palm. 'It's all okay.'

Kylo nods vacantly. That's all she needs right now.

'May I touch you?' Aimee asks.

She nods again. Aimee puts her warm hand on Kylo's knee. It feels strange, contact with another person, and tenuous, as though she must keep that leg very still. It makes her feel like crying, for some reason. She doesn't want Aimee to ever move again.

Mugs of tea float down from who knows where and she catches one. Aimee takes one in her free hand and looks over at the kitchen, and Kylo follows her gaze to Vader standing there. It takes her a moment to piece together that he made tea for them, even as the others all thank him. She can't assimilate this. Her brain feels like a wrung sponge.

The tea feels good in her chest. They're all quiet, the soft hum of the spaceship and Vader's steady breathing background to the quiet companionship.

'Hang on...' she asks eventually, 'Where are Gabriela and Trigger?' She feels another note of panic at the realisation that they aren't there, and how long did it take her to notice? That's terrible. She's terrible.

'Bathroom,' Pedima says, and okay, at least they're okay. Maybe. Oh god she feels terrible. She looks up at the bathroom door.

They all end up piling into the bathroom, sans Vader, instead of asking Gabriela and Trigger to come out. Kylo is allowed the toilet seat in deference to her ankle. Trigger is sitting on the edge of the sink, Pedima in the sonic, Aimee just on the floor, the others leaning around where they'll fit. It is not a room intended to hold seven people, three of whom are nearing six feet tall. Kylo appreciates the close quarters. It's cosy.

‘What happened?’ Pedima asks.

Kylo tunes out the answer and the subsequent conversation. She doesn’t want to relive this right now, mind still blank. Instead she lets the sound wash over her without meaning. It’s not hard, once she lets herself lets go.

She sits there until they all move, and then moves with them, piling into the bunks. She’s bone-tired. Her bed feels like the promised land. She’s out in seconds.

She wakes up in darkness, dreams dissipating, and it takes her a few moments to realise where she is. She can hear the others all still asleep, or mostly at least, even breathing and snuffling snores, small in the force under Vader’s shroud, but all there. She counts them. All six present.

She lies there quietly, not sure if she wants to get up and talk to Vader alone, not sure of what she would say to him. He said... he said some things last night. She should probably get around to thinking about that.

She rubs her eyes. It's hard to think about, still, like a creature that would rather remain out of view. He... apologised? For... for scaring her. For everything. And fuck, he heard her talking to Trigger about cutting themselves, that's the important part. She was so stupid, to talk about it in the open like that.

But he wasn't mad. He didn't tell her off. Maybe he didn't want to in front of the others, he did ask them to leave after all.

Well then. Time to see what he'll do. She gets up. She's still feeling strangely, all light and floaty, as she was last night. Maybe she overloaded on grief, she thinks, so much that she can't feel it anymore. That would make sense.

Vader is up and scrubbing the kitchen, an incongruity which crashes against her already tenuous picture of him. He looks around at her entrance. She holds up a hand in greeting and hops over to sit at the dining table. Fuck if her ankle still doesn't hurt, despite everything. Vader sets aside his sponge and turns to face her.

They're quiet. She can't look him in the face. She can't look at him at all. She says eventually, 'You wanted to talk to me alone?'

'What are you expecting to hear?'

She shrugs uncomfortably. 'I don't know, that's your call. I'm, uh. All yours.'

Silence again. She plays with her fingers nervously.

'I want you to feel safe, Kylo,' he says after a long pause. 'I want to do all I can to make that happen.'

It's not what she was expecting. It's more of the same fluff he was saying in front of the others. She flinches a little, feeling the raw rub of shame. 'Kinda out of your fuckin hands, isn't it.'

'I'm beginning to realise that.'

She does glance at him at that, not all the way still, awkward, nervous eyes falling somewhere on his chest. On the control panel there. It makes her feel somewhat better. Hearing she's right.

He asks, 'Is there anything else I could be doing?'

'God. I don't know.' She rubs at her eyes. She doesn't know how to make herself trust, or if she should let him help her do that. All the difficulty in her current situation comes flooding back at once. She starts crying, shaking mostly dryly into her hands, as though she's run out of tears to shed. It's too much. It's all too much. She doesn't know what to do or think or how to keep it all straight. She should've let Luke kill her. She just wants to rest.

She hears footsteps, then: 'May I touch you?'

It makes her look up, breath catching in her throat. Vader is standing beside her. Asking permission.

She starts crying for real. 'Sure,' she nods, barely thinking about it. 'What the hell.'

He puts a hand on her shoulder, a heavy weight. It doesn't feel bad, or good really. He's just there.

She cries for a time, shorter than she has been, again as though her body just can't muster any more. She wipes her eyes. 'C-- can I have some water?'

He removes his hand from her shoulder and goes and runs her one from the tap. Returns to standing next to her, handing it over. She drinks, too confused and muddled and cried out to feel much of anything other than relief for her thirst.

Maybe she should just... give up.

The thought makes her want to start crying again, but really, what's the worst he could do? Kill her, like she's been wanting? God, she's pathetic.

He could hurt the others. That would be worse. That's why she needs to remain vigilant. The form of it starts to shape under her hands again, caution, an eye out for danger.

She's so, so tired.

She puts the cup aside and slumps against the table like a marionette with its strings cut. She doesn't know what to do. What she needs. What the others need. She needs a nice safe bed and a family who loves her.

She screws up her face, sobbing dryly, feeling so small and young and embarrassed and vulnerable and soft. She doesn't bother to hide. She doesn't have the energy to hide. She just closes her eyes, and hides from the universe.

Vader's hand sets firm on her shoulder again, and cautiously starts rubbing. It doesn't have the warmth of living contact, but it doesn't make her afraid, either. It's anchoring. She's too tired to fight it.

She thinks about how she lashed out last night, how he fell to his knees under her threat. Fuck, he doesn't want her dead. He wouldn't've listened if he did. She doesn't know whether that means he needs them alive for something worse, or--

Or--

Wasn't she the one encouraging her friends to trust him, just a few days ago?

She doesn't know what she's doing. She should think about it, she should think of a plan. But she can't. She doesn't know what she can do, other than lie there and let him gently rub her shoulder.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> puppy thought i needed several pages of blank space, he's more of a minimalist


	16. Chapter 16

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I AM PLEASED TO ANNOUNCE I AM BACK ON MY BULLSHIT
> 
> so this chapter is like super short and mostly filler but like w/e i wanted to get it out there instead of spending time beefing it up
> 
> while my brother was fronting he made [a quiz for which of the characters are you!](https://uquiz.com/Rtk8oz) it tries very hard to come for your life but doesn't do the best of jobs. i got vader!! which is funny since im a kylo kinnie and all
> 
> also!!! if you happen to see this chapter when it first goes up i am currently streaming me making these kids in the sims! [check it out on my twitch page here.](https://www.twitch.tv/kylonaberrie) hopefully the internet won't crap out lol
> 
> also i'm gonna start posting fic extras, including future streams, on my no longer disused art blog [here!](https://kylonaberrie.tumblr.com/) so give it a follow if you're interested :D

The door opens, eventually. 'Oh,' Aimee says softly. 'Should I come back later?'

'It is alright,' Vader says, and releases Kylo's shoulder. 'Come sit down. I will make both of you tea.’

Kylo picks her head up blearily as he walks away. Aimee sits next to her, on the corner. 'Are you okay?'

'Mnuh.' Is she? Her hair is plastered to her face. She makes an I-don't-know noise as she fixes it. She can't think, right now. She's running on pure autopilot.

'May I touch you?'

'Mnhmmn.'

Aimee squeezes the hand closer to her. 'It's going to be alright, you know. And if it's not... well, that's alright too.'

Something about that strikes Kylo as right, even though her thoughts are too tangled to place what. Aimee's smart. Aimee's kept it together, through all of this. That's amazing, really. 'You're fucking amazing.'

Aimee smiles at her brightly. She smiles back, not feeling it, but she can't help the movement, Aimee's infectious. The tea kettle is bubbling loudly in the background. 'You're like, fuckin--' Kylo continues, not sure of what she's saying, words slurring together, 'You're fuckin something.'

'Thank you!'

Vader serves them tea and then goes back to standing in the kitchen, facing them. 'Thank you,' Aimee repeats, taking hers. Kylo has to let go of her hand because she can't figure out how to pick up a cup with only one of hers. The tea is warm, too hot to drink, but it feels nice to hold to her chest.

'When are we arriving at Kal’Shebbol, Mr Vader sir?' Aimee asks.

'Within the next several hours.'

'Okay, good thing, we're almost out of food.'

Kylo studies the steam rising from her cup. The liquid is golden brown. The heat feels good, her face feels looser.

The others trickle in. ‘I can make breakfast, you’ve been doing most of the cooking,’ Gabriela offers, and Aimee thanks him. Kylo sits at the table, blank, as the smell of frying meat fills the room, attracting the couple still in bed out to the main room and to the breakfast table. Aimee shares the report of their soon arrival. Vader makes to sweep back off to the cockpit, and Kylo feels a certain loss. She slaps her metaphorical hand away before she starts to examine that one, she doesn’t have it in her to fall apart again.

Trigger, anyway, stops him. ‘Lord Vader?’

He stops, and turns. Everyone looks at her. She’s standing up straight, stiff, not sat down yet, a frightened pride in the lift of her chin. ‘Yes?’

‘I’d like help bleeding my lightsaber.’

He looks at her for a moment. ‘I will help you once we’re planetside. It is too dangerous to attempt inside a spaceship.’

She nods sharply. ‘Thank you.’

Pedima, excitedly: ‘Does this mean we get to leave the ship this time?’

Vader thinks a moment more. ‘It still isn’t safe for you to enter a populated area. I will do the shopping, then move the ship to somewhere less populated. Then you can all get out, we’ll do our lightsaber work, and you can stretch your legs.’

‘Yessss.’

Saiph: 'Could you buy us some cards or something? Ideally more than one something as I assume we're going to be doing this for a while?'

'I will see what I can find. I will also buy you the comlink you requested.'

Their face grows cold. 'Thank you.'

‘Are there any more requests?’

Pedima: ‘You’re gonna get more meat, right?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then I’m good.’ She flumps back against the sofa.

‘I just agree with Saiph, we could really use something to do,’ Aimee says.

Vader: ‘What are you all interested in?’

‘A deck of cards would be lovely, like Saiph said!’

‘I don’t know if they sell media packs this far out, but that might be good too,’ Gabriela says.

‘Oh, and if you get us some fabric and sewing supplies, I can work on more clothes for all of us,’ Aimee continues.

‘Maybe like some kicky bags or something?’ Pedima suggests. ‘It’s too small to really play with anything else in here, but that’d be more fun than just sitting here. Or like a laser set or some sort of basket toss thing...’

‘Yeah!’ Gabriela agrees. ‘Even just some balls to play with, we can make it work.’

‘Or art supplies,’ Aimee again. ‘Really, like I said, just something to do...’

‘And I’m changing my name again,’ Trigger says. Everyone looks at her. She blushes.

‘What are you changing it to?’ Aimee asks, breaking the momentary silence.

‘Eurydice.’

‘That’s cool.’ Pedima says. ‘Trigger was pretty cool too but that’s even cooler.’

‘Thanks.’ Eurydice plays with her fingers awkwardly, bending them back.

Vader: ‘Is there anything else you would all like me to purchase?’

After a few moments of silence he says, ‘Very well. We will be landing in several hours.’ He goes back to the cockpit.

Gabriela: ‘Oh, breakfast is ready, by the way. And I like your name, Eurydice. It’s got a nice ring to it.’

‘Thanks.’ She still seems awkward, but joins the bustle with everyone else getting food. Aimee puts a plate down tenderly in front of Kylo with a smile. She firmly puts her hand on her shoulder for a moment. Kylo looks up at her, everything in the gesture sinking in after the night she’s had. She’s thought it already this morning but Aimee’s fantastic. Aimee’s perfect. Aimee’s beaming at her, and she smiles back.


	17. Chapter 17

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> im not gonna use space units of measurement im just not about to figure that out

Kylo leaves the ship with the others, trailing at the back of the group. Vader landed them in a large, open field by a wooded area. The sky is a warm, deep, dusty orange and the vegetation is a dark, muddy green. The ground is damp and soft with recent rain. She stands still for a few moments, letting her bad foot rest softly in the grass without putting weight on it, leaning on the wooden crutches Vader picked up for her. Something about it all makes her want to start crying, again. She doesn’t think she can cry anymore.

Instead she watches the others. Gabriela and Pedima barrel into each other, roughhousing and chasing each other around. Aimee is skipping and twirling in the middle of the field, her skirt fanning out in a circle as she dances, laughing. Saiph is taking a walk. Korrum is standing as well, aimlessly, it seems. Eurydice is standing with more purpose, waiting and watching over Kylo’s shoulder. Kylo catches her eye curiously before thinking to look over her own shoulder at Vader closing up the shuttle.

He turns to face Eurydice. He’s wearing that cape again. It sweeps with him as he moves. ‘We can bleed your lightsaber now.’

That’s right. Kylo’d forgotten already. Eurydice nods determinedly, eyes fixed on Vader’s face, chin lifted with defiance and resolve. Kylo glances away from her face then, torn back to reality, loose, and lost. She doesn’t know what she’s doing.

‘Kylo,’ Vader says. ‘Korrum.’

She looks up at him again.

‘You should observe this process to prepare yourselves for bleeding your own lightsabers in the future.’

Right. That makes sense, and beats standing around. Kylo nods. She even has her lightsaber with her, clipped to the belt of one of the new outfits Vader bought them. She’s not about to leave it behind, even if it doesn’t work. Vader sweeps off with the three of them following him to a big open spot in the field, a good distance away from the others. Korrum looks like a lost little lamb. Kylo wants to nudge his arm, but can’t figure out how to do that while still navigating the crutches and keeping up in Vader’s long-legged wake. She settles for looking at him, mouth open, but he doesn’t seem to notice.

Vader sits down cross legged in the damp grass. They sit in a loose circle with him, Kylo leaving her crutches in the grass beside her, not bothering to manipulate her legs into a meditative cross like the others have done. The dew is nice and cool against them.

‘First you must remove the crystal from your lightsaber. Do you know how to do that?’

Eurydice: ‘I know how to reverse engineer putting it in.’

Vader nods. He takes from his belt a kit rolled in black plasticy fabric and hands it to her. She unrolls it, revealing a small, fine tool set, and sets about taking apart her lightsaber.

Kylo unhooks her lightsaber from her belt and considers it. It’s heavy in her hand, heftier than some of the others she’s handled. She always liked that about it, never understood the appeal of swinging something no heavier than a kitchen knife or a holocomm, swinging something without any  _ substance, _ like some high-class spouse snapping and thinking they’ve lost it without ever leaving their bubble of stability. Like playing pretend. She looks at the now exposed innards of Eurydice’s lightsaber as she in question carefully removes the crystal under Vader’s watchful eye. Glances at Korrum; he’s watching, but vacantly. Vader narrates Eurydice’s actions. Kylo already knows how to build a lightsaber, like Eurydice she could probably figure out how to dismantle one by just doing it backwards, but Vader’s voice is somehow comforting, deep and washing over them, and his terms are technical and concise. She has no trouble keeping up, but looks at Korrum once or twice. He looks like he could be paying attention, and anyway, she doesn’t want to interrupt.

Eurydice floats the freed crystal slowly out of its casing, holding it in front of herself with the force. Its colour seems drained, like it was washed out with water, only still visibly blue at the edges, the rest ice-pale.

Vader says, ‘It has mostly bled out already. It would be much more difficult to bleed a crystal that was still devoted to the light side. That should never be attempted by an adept or around other people. But I believe you will be able to complete bleeding this crystal. Still, we will move several yards away from the others.’

Eurydice nods and stands up, keeping the crystal levitated in front of her, and leaving her lightsaber casing behind. Kylo sits with Korrum and watches as she and Vader walk a short distance away from them, closer to the treeline. Saiph is watching now too, Kylo notices, from a distance away. Vader’s voice still carries in the mostly empty clearing. ‘Concentrate hard on your anger and hate and pain for everything that has happened to you and that you know has happened to others. Draw the dark side into yourself as much as possible. When you are ready, take the crystal in hand and force all of your feelings upon it. Channel all of your energy into it. You must overpower its will. But its will is weak. Far weaker than yours.’

Eurydice nods, and glances up at Vader, and then closes her eyes. There’s a few minutes of her just breathing, beginning to tense up. Her shoulders rise and fall like an irregular machine. They’re all quiet.

When she opens her eyes she glances quickly at Vader, and then in one fluid movement snatches her crystal out of the air. Red-pink light begins to crackle around her, centering around her hand and spiralling into a whirlwind. The wind in the field picks up. Kylo gets to her feet in case she has to move, tugging at Korrum’s shoulder so he does the same. Eurydice’s eyes are held wide open, reflecting pink, and then Kylo can’t see her at all through the light. It’s bathing pink on all of them. Vader’s still standing calmly, mere feet from where Eurydice disappeared into the torrent. Gabriela appears at Kylo’s shoulder, glancing at her nervously before looking back at the storm. Kylo would say something but she doesn’t feel like she can, and the wind is getting so loud, howling, whipping her hair around her face and Vader’s cape up like a great swarm of bats. From the center of the whirlwind: a deafening high-pitched scream.

Gabriela makes forward, surging at the sound. Kylo lets one of her crutches drop in order to grab him by the shoulder. He turns to look at her, eyes big, and fearful. Kylo’s vaguely aware of all the others, frozen as she feels, bathed in red light. She doesn’t know why she’s stopping Gabriela. She doesn’t know if she should be.

But then a flash like lightning blinds all of them for a second, and then the wind and the light quickly die down. Kylo lets go of Gabriela’s shoulder and he runs over to Eurydice, who is panting, dazed. Kylo hobbles over too, getting there slower as the others swarm. Vader puts out his arm to hold them all back. Gabriela looks ready to bite him for a second, but he, and even Pedima, who is too short to be stopped by such things, stay back and give Eurydice a few feet of space.

Eurydice seems to come to quickly, still breathing hard but blinking and letting her eyes focus on her hand. She opens it, revealing a gleaming, hot pink crystal, glimmering with some live energy, vivid like a cut open fruit. She looks up from it to Vader.

‘You did well,’ he says.

She nods, swallows. ‘Wh-- where’s the casing? I wanna see if it works.’

‘You will rebuild your lightsaber once you have calmed down. Your hands are not steady enough.’

She looks down at her hands, which are shaking, and laughs a little. ‘Oh.’

Vader turns to look at the rest of them. ‘Some of you, go locate their lightsaber casing. The whirlwind they created was larger than I anticipated and it may have moved.’

Pedima and Aimee head off. Gabriela gives Vader a meaningful look, then looks down at the arm still held out to keep them back. Vader lowers it. Gabby goes to Eurydice and puts his hand gently on her shoulder. ‘Hey. Are you alright?’

Kylo feels-- shamed, suddenly, that it’s not her doing that. Isn’t she supposed to look after everyone? Didn’t she promise to keep them safe?  _ Did _ she promise to keep them safe? She can’t remember. Shit, did she? She has to. She’s going to keep them all safe, they have to know that. Panic starts climbing her shoulders.

Pedima appears and breaks her tunnel vision. ‘I found your other crutch.’ She has it held over her head like a prized kill.

Kylo smiles, biting her lower lip. ‘Thanks,’ she makes herself say, because she feels it, even if she doesn’t feel like talking. She takes the crutch.

‘You’re welcome!~’ Pedima runs off again, probably in search of lightsaber parts. Kylo looks up. Gabby still has his hand on Eurydice’s shoulder. Vader has backed off, simply standing there again. Guilt still gnaws gently at Kylo, but it feels a lot more okay.


	18. Chapter 18

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> BIG warning for the themes of this fic here, the whole deal at the temple is talked about in more detail here, including talking abt child deaths

Leia doesn’t take her hands off the ship’s steering the whole trip out to Dagobah. It’s a straight shot from the conference she was attending on Baroli, and she spends most of the trip in hyperspace, several hours staring at and barely seeing the streaks of blue light through the cockpit window, heart pounding, thoughts racing before going blank before racing again.

_ ‘There was an incident at Master Skywalker’s academy,’  _ the mediator had said over the comm, image flickering slightly with the distance.  _ ‘Several students were killed, and several have gone missing, the latter group including your son. Master Skywalker himself has been hospitalised and is refusing to speak to us... Surviving students report there being an altercation. The absence of the shuttle suggests one or more of the missing students left for parts unknown...’ _

Between the numbness and the blinding shock, Leia had somehow managed to grill them for answers, not realising things she had said until she was halfway to Dagobah, compartmentalising and turning over and over and over the information she had received.

She knows this: It’s been four days since this happened. The main temple was burned down, disrupting the communications tower. Some surviving students had attempted unsuccessfully to repair it, but it was the lack of communication that indicated to the Edula City Safety Office something was wrong, as a delivery person had attempted to check in and alerted officials that the academy could not be reached. They had sent a mechanic expecting to find a broken comm tower in need of parts. Instead they found--

Of Luke’s nineteen students, seven were missing, six were dead, and the remaining six had been taken to a trauma center for questioning. Ben was one of the missing ones. Luke had suffered moderate to severe blunt damage and a large laceration to the shoulder. Evidence suggested a building had collapsed on him. One of the surviving students had found him and prevented him from bleeding out. He was going to be fine and was already making a speedy recovery, but refused to talk to mediators, investigators, or any other safety office officials. Investigators were still in the process of discovering what happened.

She’s gone through this information so many times, trying to find what she can do, trying to find the secret thread to pull on, trying not to panic. She needs to talk to Luke. She needs to find out what happened, and why he won’t talk to the Edula City Safety Office, and where her son is.

She needs to find out where her son is.

She’s glad, at least, that she has a fast ship.  _ The Falcon would be faster, _ she thinks, once, and then she doesn’t think that again.

Time continues to pass numbly, as she lands at the small spaceport and takes an open-air tram like the ones they used to use in the Rebellion to the Edula City Hospital and Trauma Center. It’s a small city. It’s a small hospital, and a small trauma center. It’s not all white, at least. Not sterile feeling. Something about the quality of the tile flooring echoes a horrible feeling in her chest. She finds a safety officer and asks to see Luke. They let her. The safety officer has to unlock the door.

Luke is sitting on his bed, looking out the window at the dark evening sky. He doesn’t look around when the door opens, or when she walks in and the officer locks the door again behind her. She knows he knows she’s there. She knows he knows it’s her. He still doesn’t look.

‘Luke.’

He sighs, shoulders drooping, and looks over at her. He looks wrecked. His face is purpled with bruises, half puffy, and his eyes are infinitely sad. He looks older, than when she last left him. Something strikes at Leia’s core, seeing him like this. It’s not the injuries, it’s the fact that he’s injured. Her brother, her brother  _ Luke Skywalker _ doesn’t have accidents. He doesn’t fail to duck or dodge. He doesn’t freeze and he doesn’t fall and he definitely doesn’t have buildings collapse on him without him catching them with the fucking force and goddamnit, what happened and why? Why is he hurt? Why is he looking at her like that?

Where is her son?

Leia’s own shoulders fall. Sadness and grief and everything threaten to take her over for a moment but with a practiced hand she shoves them back. ‘Luke, what happened?’

Luke looks away from her again. He’s quiet for moments. For minutes.

‘Please tell me what happened.’

He sighs. He doesn’t look at her when he says, ‘I fucked up, Leia.’

Terror strikes her. What did he  _ do? _

‘What--’ she starts again, but her comlink buzzes, and she answers it in an instant, hoping it’s Han. It isn’t Han.

‘Senator Organa, this is Mediator Tyalla. We have a loose summation of what happened, if you’d like to come to the lobby, I can take you to speak with an investigator.’

‘I’ll be right there,’ she says, and looks at Luke again as she puts down her comm. He’s looking at the window. At his own reflection.

‘I’ll be back,’ she promises, and gets the safety officer to let her out.

The investigator meets her in a room in the trauma center. ‘Senator Organa,’ they say, and bow briefly, liquid dark eyes serious. ‘I’m Investigator Larundra. They/them.’

‘Senator Leia Organa, she/her. Please, let’s get to the point.’

‘Of course. Have a seat.’

She sits across from the investigator at the low table. ‘We’ve spoken to the survivors of the incident at the temple. Only one of the six students was present for the deaths, and is currently too traumatised to give us a clear report. However, we were able to piece together an approximation of the events based on what this individual told the other students, what these students did witness, and evidence at the site. Please know that this information may be subject to updates or corrections as we learn more.’

Leia nods, tersely. Larunda continues: ‘Four nights ago, there was a conflict between your son Ben and Master Skywalker. This conflict ended in Ben’s sleeping hut collapsing and trapping Master Skywalker underneath. Ben then used the intercom to attempt to rouse the other students and gather them in the commons. All but five, these being five of the six survivors, woke and met Ben. Ben told the gathered students that Master Skywalker had attacked him, and urged them all to run away with him for their own safety.’

Leia’s world stills. Words wash over her before she realises she’s missing them.  _ Ben told the gathered students that Master Skywalker had attacked him-- _ Her heat pounds in her throat, and her vision is blurred.

_ Luke, what did you  _ do?

She breathes in, breathes out, mind working furiously, desperately grasping for purchase. She needs to find her son. She needs to make Luke tell her what happened and why and where Ben went. She needs someone with a magic wand to come in and  _ fix this-- _

Through the popping blackness and screaming in her mind’s eye, she knows: Luke is the one with the magic.  _ She _ is the one who is going to fix this.

She forces her vision to focus, brings her eyes back to Inspector Larunda’s face. They’re looking patiently concerned, round black eyes set in slick orange skin like liquid marbles on either side of a calmly still trunk. She forces herself to breathe.

‘Keep talking,’ she tells them.

‘I must warn you, this next part will also come as a shock.’

‘I’m okay,’ she says, and as she says it, it becomes something she can believe. Her hands are back on the joysticks. She can do this, because she has to. ‘Please, I need all the information I can get.’

They nod slowly. ‘This is the part we are fuzziest on, so please remember that this information may be subject to change as we learn more.’

She nods. They take a breath. ‘The gathered students immediately began arguing about Ben’s claim. This became heated enough to turn into physical fighting. During the fight, six students were killed.’

Leia’s breath catches, but while her mind races -- did Ben, is  _ Ben --  _ she keeps it together, riding on the same wave of determination and compartmentalisation and everything else she’s had to get so good at. She takes a deep breath, and shoves it all down, and nods. ‘Go on.’

‘At some point, a fire was started or spread out of control, burning the commons. It collapsed, partially on the comm tower, damaging it. There were eight survivors to the confrontation, plus the five who had stayed in their cabins. Seven of these children left for parts unknown. We don’t have confirmation of whether they all stuck together or not, but we’ve had survey teams search the woods and so far haven’t found anyone. Given the missing shuttle, it’s safe to assume one or more of them left the planet.

‘That was four days ago. This morning, a supply delivery envoy was unable to get in contact with the academy, and alerted city officials when they weren’t able to. A mechanic was sent first to check on the tower, then safety officers, mediators, and investigators once the mechanic arrived and reported that something had happened. The safety office contacted the families of every student shortly thereafter. Of the ones we were able to get in touch with, you are the first to arrive.’

Leia takes a moment to breathe and quickly assimilate all this information. At least it’s mostly things she heard over the comm, mostly things she’s already had time to pour over. And she knows what she needs to do.

‘Who are the other missing students?’ She pulls a small tablet from her pocket and thumbs it open, ready to take notes.

The investigator hesitates for a moment, thinking, but then tells her. ‘Aimee Culling Bird, Shiro Yoshida, Saiph Mendoza-Vasquez, Gabriela Chaudri, Elise DuPont, and Lucas Eirtiki Shalduraz Third-Fifth, who was going by the name Pedima.’

The names sound familiar; Leia’s spoken to Luke here and there about his students. But she can’t put faces to them, and Ben didn’t have any friends. ‘I’d like their families’ contact information.’

‘You’ll have to speak to the safety office to have that released. I can put you in contact with the right people to do so.’

She makes note of the comm numbers and associated names they tell her. ‘May I ask how the six victims died?’ It makes a difference, whether each was intentional or an accident. Six is a high number for an accident. Still.

Investigator Larunda looks momentarily surprised, but again, tells her. ‘Four died from lightsaber wounds. Of these four, three suffered slashing damage and the fourth was stabbed. One died from blunt force trauma to the head, and was found under rubble, which from its location may have been thrown at the victim. The sixth was choked.’

Leia can deal with the deaths of children. Leia’s had to deal with the deaths of children since she herself was a child. It’s terrible, but it is what it is. But the last sentence stops her in her tracks. ‘Choked?’

‘Yes. The autopsy showed a collapsed trachea.’

Her mind and heart and blood all start racing again. They had done autopsies on some of Vader’s victims, in the Rebellion. The people he choked to death always appeared unbruised, even untouched. Only by looking deeper than the skin could one tell he had collapsed their windpipes.

It’s an easy way to attack with the force. The neck is vulnerable, and an instinctual target for bipedal species. But it still triggers something within her.

These deaths, these murders-- the slashing damage could be done in the heat of a duel, and the blunt trauma could easily occur even if one wasn’t trying to kill. Stabbing could be an accident, but probably isn’t. And you don’t go for the throat by chance.

‘Can the shuttle be tracked?’

‘We’re in the process of tracking it, but without Skywalker’s cooperation we’re being forced to work out the serial number of the shuttle and security service providing the tracking on our own.’

Something in Leia’s heart clamps down hard. ‘I’ll talk to him again.’

‘Thank you. Let me give you my contact information before you go.’

She records this in her notes and then has a security officer take her back to Luke’s room. She knows something’s wrong from the hallway. He’s not there. She can feel him out in the universe, but not on the other side of the door.

Inside the room is empty. The window is open. Leia spots a plast pamphlet left on Luke’s bed. Through the howling picking up in her ears, she picks it up and looks it over.

On the back of “Trauma Recovery and You” is scratched a message:  _ Leia, I’m sorry. I’m going to fix this. _

_ \-- Luke _


End file.
